Month: October 2004

In the roughly 25 years since his death at age 50, Steve McQueen has enjoyed a vibrant afterlife in the American pop consciousness. Including memoirs by two ex-wives, biographical treatments have come out at a pace of at least one every three years. Remakes of his movies—Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger’s turn at The Getaway in 1994, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in 1999’s The Thomas Crown Affair—goose interest in the originals and, muezzin-like, issue a call for a new round of genuflections to McQueen’s signature variety of narcissistic masculinity. Many of these show up in hagiographic profiles in men’s magazines. Donal Logue’s overweight, slacker, 30-something Dex bends the McQueen mystique into an everyman formula for scoring chicks in 2000’s The Tao of Steve. McQueen the tabloid persona is made to breathe again in 2002’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, movie mogul Robert Evans’ attempt to cement his legend in a rollicking, hep-cat autobiographical documentary that, in its account of the ebb and flow of Hollywood fortune, covers the downer of Evans losing his wife, actress Ali MacGraw, to McQueen during the filming of the original Getaway, in 1972. And this week the Virginia Film Festival will screen the McQueen movies The Great Escape and Bullitt and host a tribute to the latter’s seminal car chase scene with stuntman Loren Janes in connection with this year’s theme of “Speed.”

 The kinds of things McQueen actually did in the roughly 25 major motion pictures that made up his film career—a narrowly consistent sequence of cinematic images, gestures and actions—establish the persona that made McQueen one of the top box-office draws of his time and which continues to resonate today. And his off-screen biography, a compelling tandem, variously gave the persona a certain depth or authenticity and conditioned the performances themselves.

 There was, for one thing, McQueen’s affinity for machinery—cars, motorcycles, aircraft—and, indeed, speed. McQueen was an accomplished racer and genuine sportsman, amassing a credible resume in national and international competitions. The action set pieces that anchor his movies were often conceived and incorporated at his behest, and McQueen was behind the wheel for much of the stunt work.

 Additionally, McQueen’s dialogue was stripped to a bare minimum, again often at the insistence of the actor, a notorious prima donna who exercised an overweening grip on his productions even before establishing superstar clout. Spare, self-contained, wounded and distrustful, a loner ensnarled in vaguely alien systems marked by ambiguous, superficial corruption and hostility, McQueen’s characters were taciturn men of action, forceful and even bullying in restless, solitary pursuit of expansive needs—for love, respect and freedom, for victory over a system that had drawn first blood by being so inhospitable. They seemed to emerge from the same rough childhood that shaped McQueen, or some variation of it.

 

The cycle of abuse begins

McQueen was born in 1930 in a suburb of Indianapolis. The son of a teenage alcoholic mother and stunt pilot father who abandoned the family when Steve was an infant, McQueen was left to the care of his uncle, a successful Missouri farmer, for most of his early childhood. This period of relative tranquility ended when, at age 12, McQueen reunited with his mother in Indianapolis, and then moved with her and a new stepfather to wartime Los Angeles. Disinterested in school and suffering from abandonment by his parents and a deeply unstable home life as well as physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather, McQueen joined street gangs, committed petty crimes and wound up in a Chino reform school in 1944.

 While McQueen was at the reformatory, his stepfather died unexpectedly and his mother moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she was able to meld with her bohemian environs, according to a memoir by Neile McQueen Toffel, McQueen’s first wife. McQueen’s mother summoned him east from Chino after he finished ninth grade, and put him up in a rented room while she shacked up with a cinematographer she’d first met in Los Angeles and with whom she was trying to cultivate a long-term relationship. McQueen soon quit the situation and joined the merchant marine for a brief spell before jumping ship in the Dominican Republic and finding work as a towel boy in a brothel. Stints as an oil-field laborer in Texas and a logger in Canada followed. At age 17, McQueen joined the Marines and trained as a tank driver, earning an honorable discharge (after a couple of stays in the brig for going absent without leave) shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War.

 McQueen returned to New York and scraped by on a series of jobs and small-time confidence scams, and attended night school on the GI Bill. According to biographer William Nolan, McQueen was still casting about when a girlfriend suggested he apply for training as an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Sanford Meisner, the school’s impresario, admitted him, and remarked later that McQueen struck him as “both tough and childlike—as if he’d been through the wars of life but had managed to preserve a certain basic innocence.”

 Stage work followed, and then admission to the more exclusive Actors Studio and indoctrination in the Method school of acting. After that, various television appearances and his silver screen debut: a walk-on in the 1956 Paul Newman boxing flick Somebody Up There Likes Me.

 

“Short sentences and short words”

It was in his New York period when McQueen met his first wife, then named Neile Adams, an ascendant dancer and actress whose career began to take off just ahead of McQueen’s. In her memoir, Neile wrote, “Later on, as a movie star, he would conclude that his personality, projected onto the screen, was the most important element in his acting technique.” And, for the rest of his life, McQueen’s personality never appeared to stray appreciably from the patterns and experiences of his first two decades or so.

 McQueen’s marriages to Neile and Ali MacGraw were intensely volatile, roiled by McQueen’s wanton philandering and determination to assert his primacy, and held together in large measure, it seems, by extraordinary docility in each wife and the deep attraction each felt toward him. While his mother exhibited a bruising disregard for her son, McQueen pressed both MacGraw and Neile to give up promising acting careers in favor of a singular spousal role, telling Life magazine in a 1962 profile, “I dig my old lady, not the maid, serving me dinner.”

 In her memoir, MacGraw wrote, “With Steve and me, confrontation was the norm.” She recounted how, just as their affair began during filming of The Getaway, McQueen would “very flagrantly pick up one or more of the stream of bimbos who were always around on the set” when he was angry with her, and one incident where she nevertheless cooked breakfast for him the next morning.

 According to Neile’s account, her marriage finally foundered after 15 years amid McQueen’s profound mid-life crisis. His drug use intensified dramatically, and affairs he formerly conducted with discretion he would now flaunt, she wrote. Plying her with cocaine one night, she wrote, McQueen lured her into confessing an infidelity with the actor Maximilian Schell, leading to a sequence of recurring jealous rages and terrifying physical abuse.

 In a 1999 biographical sketch in Premiere magazine, Andy Webster quoted McQueen friend and karate instructor Pat Johnson on the wariness that McQueen’s streetwise history had engendered in him. “[The idea that] you can never trust people—that’s what he lived by. Life was a scam. It was always, ‘What does this person want from me? They’re acting nice, but what’s behind it?’ He couldn’t accept people at face value,” Johnson told Webster. “You had to con people. It was all about survival, which you learn in the street…He was constantly fighting between ‘I’ll prove I’m somebody,’ and ‘I’m not worthy; I’m going to destroy this.’”

 Indeed, his avid pursuit of stardom, his famous ego clashes and the artistic control he demanded over his onscreen persona echoed the drive and frantic energy of McQueen’s itinerant youth.

 McQueen’s first big paycheck came with a three-year stint, starting in 1958, as bounty hunter Josh Randall on the western TV series “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” He had taken the job with some trepidation at the possibility of being marooned in television for the rest of his career, and, despite his lack of tenure in the Hollywood firmament, immediately proved to be a fractious star. Later, he expressed some regret about the way he handled himself on the show to Nolan, the biographer: “One mistake I made was forgetting about the dignity of my directors. I’d get into a scene, and I’d suddenly be tellin’ the other actors how to play it. Then I’d have to go over and apologize to the director. But one thing was for sure, I understood the character of Josh Randall.”

 Producer Ed Adamson recalled for Nolan his formula for getting along with McQueen, which centered on making sure his lines were made up of “short sentences and short words,” in deference to McQueen’s sensitivity about his lack of education. “When some director refused to shorten a speech for Steve he could turn into a real mean son of a bitch,” he said.

 Walter Hill, the screenwriter for The Getaway, recalled something similar about McQueen’s penchant for lean dialogue. “He was concerned about every scene, down to the smallest plot point,” he told Nolan. “Steve tended not to like dialogue, especially long speeches, and preferred to convey thought through body language. In my opinion, he was the best actor in the last 25 years at getting real emotion across without having to say a word.”

 

“Watch his eyes”

With top billing in 1963’s The Great Escape, McQueen reached a new level of stardom and box-office credibility. The behind-the-scenes story contained some characteristic elements: McQueen is credited with the idea for the climactic motorcycle chase and performed many of the stunts for it; the script was mostly improvised during filming and McQueen wrestled with John Sturges, the director, over his part, walking out on the production at one point.

 In the finished product, McQueen’s character, Captain Virgil “The Cooler King” Hilts, did many McQueen-esque things. At first instinctively working apart from the hierarchy of British Royal Air Force prisoners, who are planning a major break from their Nazi prison camp with the hope of diverting significant enemy resources from the front lines, the American Hilts walks the yard’s perimeter searching for weaknesses. With his blue eyes and flaxen hair, and his head poking out of his sweatshirt and leather jacket in the shape of an inverted teardrop, McQueen’s movements are marked by a lithe athleticism. Hilts earns his nickname with a couple of solo escape attempts that land him in solitary confinement, where he makes a tentative alliance with a British prisoner with his own reasons for an early escape. And, of course, there is McQueen’s hijacking of a Nazi motorcycle for use as an off-road escape pod at the end of the film.

 Sounding like Walter Hill as previously quoted, director Sam Peckinpah said of McQueen, “If you really want to learn about acting for the screen, watch his eyes.” Doing this literally, of course, you see them twitter around in his sockets, depending on what he’s looking at; sometimes, in outdoor shots, McQueen’s gaze moves into the line of the sun, and he acts like he’s squinting.

 But McQueen’s persona rests heavily on a cumulative effect: There are certain things McQueen would stand around and do, and certain things he wouldn’t.

 In Bullitt, a 1968 police thriller built around a live-action car chase through the streets of San Francisco, McQueen instantly slides into the role of a hard-boiled, incorruptible, all-business cop simply by impassively listening to a pitch by Walter Chalmers, an on-the-make politician played by Robert Vaughn. “Sam said you were the man for the job, and I can’t see a flaw in that statement,” Chalmers tells Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, enlisting him to protect a prize witness. “A Senatorial hearing has a way of catapulting everyone involved into the public eye, with subsequent effect on one’s career. It’d be a pleasure to have you along.”

 In addition to the contrast with Chalmers, Bullitt is established as a kind of rebel by the fact of his bohemian girlfriend, played by Jacqueline Bisset. In turn, his relationship with her, marked by a reserve on his part—a desire to conceal the violence that stains him on the job—is sketched in a couple snippets of dialogue. “It’s not for you, baby,” he says when she asks about a nighttime phone call he just received. “Everything you do is a part of me,” she responds.

 Despite the lead’s Brahmin trappings in The Thomas Crown Affair, the role at its essence presents a familiar McQueen scenario. Thomas Crown, a wealthy real estate mogul, orchestrates a complicated bank robbery and becomes romantically involved with Vicki Anderson (played by Faye Dunaway), the viciously aggressive, femme fatale insurance investigator who gets on his trail. At one point, Crown asserts that his motive, as a rich man, for robbing a bank boils down to his view that, “It’s me against the system.” In the run-up to the final test of Anderson’s loyalty that serves as the film’s emotional climax—a choice between Crown and her commission for recovering the stolen money—Crown has a tryst with a casual love interest who had slid from view early in the movie, knowing he was under surveillance. Later, sitting together on beach chairs, Crown assures the wounded Anderson, “Hey, listen. She was just a way of putting you in touch with yourself.”

 So The Great Escape has the frisson of the McQueen ideal, if not the wit or psychological drama of a POW-escape movie like Stalag 17, for example. And for many audiences, McQueen’s minimal approach makes him a sort of negative space, a forgettable cipher. But for those in the ticket-buying public that elected him a singular onscreen hero and sustain him as an ongoing concern, he has poetically congealed with a certain way of behaving and joined a pantheon of leading men with, ultimately, ineffable appeal.

 Among his fans, critic James Wolcott, in a 2000 Vanity Fair tribute, aggrandizes McQueen’s lifelong relationship with machines: “Steve McQueen bonded with metal, making steel an extension of himself. Sports cars, guns, motorcycles—he handled them as if they were wedded to his fingertips, his sure control infused with charisma through a daredevil zeal for speed, tight corners, and sudden catapults.”

 Likewise, the New Yorker’s Roger Angell, in reviewing McQueen’s penultimate film—Tom Horn, a Western released shortly before the actor’s death—finds an apotheotic stoicism in the roles McQueen inhabited: “But McQueen’s immense popularity rests on our view of him as the efficient, almost silent technician-soldier, who functions in a steadfast, uncomplaining manner within a larger, mostly corrupt structure that will grind him up in the end.”

 

Tough guy vs. the killer

McQueen, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in late 1979. The form of the disease with which he was stricken, mesothelioma, was associated with exposure to asbestos, which, notably, was used in protective suits worn by racecar drivers. McQueen famously sought alternative treatment under the care of a controversial former Texas dentist, but succumbed to the disease in November 1980, suffering a heart attack after an operation to remove massive tumors.

 In her memoir, Neile recalled an episode in 1972 when McQueen was covertly hospitalized for the removal of throat polyps that she, in retrospect, views as the first sign of the disease that would kill him—a mournful note about the possibility for an early detection and a cure. In his last years there were other hints at how things could have been different: In 1975, for instance, he with little regret priced himself out of the lead role for Apocalypse Now. But in the end, McQueen was the thing he had worked so hard to invent, implacably McQueen.

 

What a man…
Sure, the name Steve McQueen conjures up ineffable cool,that whole strong-silent thing. But, McQueen ain’t alone. The movies bulge with real-manhood. C-VILLE’s scientific office survey reveals at least 10 other instances of cinematic virility incarnate.

• Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke
• Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction
• Denzel Washington in Glory
• Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans
• Brad Pitt in Fight Club
• George Clooney in Three Kings
• Antonio Banderas in Desperado
• Sean Connery in Dr. No
• Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day

—Mutt Bones

A: Purrrfect! Ace has had enough of these doggone questions about who’s building what where and why those things are over there when they used to be somewhere else. Thanks, Mutt, for a question that makes Ace’s hind leg wiggle.

 The first consideration when naming a furry companion is species. For example, Mutt, if your new pet happens to be a cow, Ace recommends names that begin with “Miss.” If, however, your new pet is a baby nerd, allow Ace to direct you to the “What to Name Your Baby Nerd” website, www.namenerds.com. Suggestions there include a recent Name of the Day, Zivan, “a nice, Slavic choice.”

 Ace understands, though, that most new pets are either dogs or cats. With this in mind, may Ace suggest you get to know your pet? Observe his or her habits with the practiced eye of an amateur zoologist. If Dog scratches a lot, christen him “Itchy.” If Cat can’t shut up, try “Chatty” on for size. If Dog has a penchant for falling in love with tubercular prostitutes, call him “Alexandre Dumas Fils.” Or follow Ace’s own example. The Ace pooch is widely appreciated for his ability to anoint fireplugs with eau de dog, so Ace callshim “Whizzard.”

 If you’re one of those people who think animals should have human names, Ace advises a perusal of a Top 20 list of doggy names. This includes Jake, Casey and Charlie, for males. Lucy, Molly and Maggie for females (Ace once knew a bitch named Lucy, but Ace digresses…). Kitties, apparently, prefer names that scare people, hence the popularity of Tiger. If your pet is transgender, submit “Casey” or “Pat” for his/her consideration. Other popular cross-species names include Buddy, Prince, Missy and Lady.

 If you’re still up a tree without a firefighter, then open the dictionary for pet-name ideas. Close your eyes and put your finger down on a word. In practice runs, Ace turned up the promising names Pushful, Menstruation and Bill of Divorce. “Bill” is the obvious nickname for the last one.

 Ace must also note that popular pet names vary from country to country, from state to state, and from century to century. In Alaska for example, a popular dog name is “Pukulria,” meaning “bone chewer.” Popular Hungarian dog names include “Zsuzsa” and “Blamazs.” (No, Ace cannot provide a pronunciation guide. Ace is an investigative journalist, damn it, not a linguist!) Si ton chien est français, you have no choice. Name him Balzac or Eiffel. Name a female dog Ovary, er, Bovary. If your dog is an ancient Egyptian, consider him the honored namesake of that historic canine, Hekenu.

 Finally, keep in mind that most pets don’t care what you call them, as long as, in that time-honored tradition, you don’t call them late for dinner.

—Sierra Clubbed

A: Ah, Sierra. Ace, proud American that he is, adheres to popular national slogans such as “bigger is better,” “richer is better” and “thinner is better.” Thus, had higher-ups in the office not challenged Ace’s wisdom, Ace would just have soon assumed that “greener is better” too.

 As with all mortals, assumptions make an ass out of Ace. An urgent call to Dede Smith, director of the Ivy Creek Foundation, revealed to Ace that what you, Sierra, mistook for spraypaint is really none other than what Smith calls that “most common household herbicide” known as Roundup. For those of Ace’s dear readers who think that Roundup is the garden variety of Ronco’s famous hair-in-a-can for balding men, think again.

 Roundup, termed a fairly “innocuous herbicide” by Smith, turns its victims florescent green before killing the little pussycats. Thus, should grass in a designated “natural area” get a little wild, the folks who take care of Ivy Creek keep some Roundup on hand to avoid a potentially Frankensteinian situation. While it may not sound exactly “natural,” rest assured that there are no plans to pave paradise to put up a parking lot.

 Smith explained to Ace that half a mile of the Ivy Creek trail is paved to make it easier for people with disabilities. However, “with time, the grass grows up through [the cracks in the pavement] and in time narrows [the path].” This makes the Ivy Creek path about as friendly to disabled naturalists in search of an easy walk in the woods as the Appalachian Trail was to Bill Bryson. While Smith and Co. first tried weeding, they soon went wringing their hands in the direction of the Parks Department, which is in charge of spraying deviant vegetation.

 The herbicide dosage is annual. According to Smith, about once a year “the situation starts impeding the ability to use the trail the way that it’s supposed to be used.” That’s when the Parks Department suits up and arrives with the Roundup, riffing on Morrissey: “From the ice-age, to the dole-age, there is but one concern, I have just discovered, some grass is greener than others…”

 But Ace digresses. Smith also noted that with the recent rains, the patches along the path sprayed with Roundup had all but lost their greenish, Technicolor glow and life is back to normal. The birds sing; the wind blows; the creek trickles along; and the squirrels throw acorns at hapless hikers. So, take a deep breath. Relax. The Emerald City remains out of reach.

Fans of “The Simpsons” might remember that classic fourth-season episode, “Marge versus the Monorail,” in which a smooth-talking stranger convinces the animated folks of Springfield to build an electric monorail. The cartoon huckster absconds with the town’s money moments before the shoddy contraption goes haywire, to hilarious results.

 I thought of the episode when I heard some folks in Charlottesville wanted to build an electric streetcar.

 A group of Charlottesville leaders have embarked on a mission to build a streetcar line on W. Main Street, between the Downtown Mall and UVA, maybe up Emmet Street to the Barracks Road Shopping Center. It won’t happen for years, if at all, but two weeks ago, a local group called the Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation got the ball rolling by rounding up city and county politicians, planners and real estate developers, to fly them to the Eden of progressive urban planning (and the hometown of “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening)—Portland, Oregon.

 ACCT thought the group would be impressed not only by the country’s best example of a modern streetcar, a $60 million system covering a two-mile, L-shaped loop through west Portland, but also the pricey new high-rise condos springing up along the streetcar line, about $1.5 billion worth and counting. The streetcar’s true believers say the same potential for such dense, lucrative real estate development exists in Charlottesville, but first it needs a streetcar to make it grow.

 A sleek, 21st-century electric streetcar on W. Main Street, the experts say, will be so irresistibly cool that the hip and affluent will be willing to buy a condominium there instead of a suburban home elsewhere.

 The promise of style and wealth at the end of a streetcar line echos the salesman’s monorail pitch in “The Simpsons.” Voiced by the late Phil Hartman, he plays the crowd with a quip that his idea is probably too fancy, too progressive for Springfield. In fact, it might work better somewhere else, like nearby Shelbyville.

 “We’re twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville!” bellows Springfield’s Mayor Quimby. “Tell us your idea, and we’ll vote for it!”

 Charlottesville, too, has a not-so-secret image of itself as a town on the move, but it won’t be so easily sold on a multi-million project that may—or may not—attract the development payoff. To see if Portland’s streetcar is really as cool as ACCT says, and if its success can be duplicated in Charlottesville, C-VILLE tagged along on their brief field trip to the Left Coast.

 After spending three days riding streetcars in Portland, and Tacoma, Washington, we can truthfully report that they are, in fact, cool. So cool, in fact, that in coming months the streetcar’s true believers will begin laying the political and financial foundation for ultramodern transit here in Charlottesville. The quality of their groundwork may determine whether our version of ultramodern transit becomes part of a national model or a cartoonish boondoggle.

 

All aboard

The path toward a streetcar began last October, when then-Mayor Maurice Cox organized a “transportation summit” that brought planning experts to diagnose Charlottesville’s traffic woes and recommend solutions.

 Two of the experts, Robert Cervero and Robert Dunphy, hailed from the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit think tank promoting “responsible leadership in the use of land to enhance the total environment,” according to the ULI website. The summit also included Ignacio Bunster-Ossa—an architect with WRT, the Philadelphia firm to whom Cox kicked down millions of dollars worth of work while he was on City Council—and G.B. Arrington, who helped craft Portland’s innovative land-use policies.

 “What we have learned,” Bunster-Ossa said at the summit last year, “is that there isn’t a single grand idea that can provide this vision in the future, but rather a number of small and calculated smart moves.”

 The moves include coaxing developers to build upscale condominiums and apartment buildings on W. Main, similar to the Belmont Lofts or Norcross Station that have sprung up south of the Downtown Mall. City Hall’s role, the experts said, is making W. Main attractive to people who have the means and desire to pay $250,000 for a 1,400-square-foot condo. Specifically, this means building wide, shady sidewalks, encouraging diverse residential and retail options and, finally, alternatives to the automobile.

 That’s where the streetcar comes in. In Portland, streetcar enthusiasts say the line was instrumental in convincing developers to build high-rise condominiums in what was once an abandoned rail yard. Now, the streetcar is an integral part of the developers’ marketing pitch to sell their condos as part of a stylish urban lifestyle.

 Rick Gustafson, one of Portland’s true believers, is a former Oregon state delegate, a former regional planning official and currently CEO of Portland Streetcar, Inc., the nonprofit company that operates Portland’s streetcar system.

 “The streetcar is part of a strategy,” Gustafson says. “The streetcar plays a role in somebody deciding to invest here, and we think the streetcar helped spur the sales. The streetcar is a major incentive to convince people to be a part of these projects.”

 Cox believes the same thing can happen on W. Main Street.

 “I’m absolutely convinced that a streetcar is the next big thing,” says Cox.

 Earlier this year, Cox helped ACCT secure a $100,000 grant from the Blue Moon Fund—formerly the W. Alton Jones Foundation—to send a delegation of Charlottesville and Albemarle leaders to Portland, hoping they would share his enthusiasm and, when they returned, begin spreading the good news around the city.

 

“Go by Streetcar”

The Portland excursion included two groups [see sidebar, page 19]. Local architects Gary Okerlund and Todd Gordon of Okerlund and Associates led the tour. On our first day, as the group strolled from the hotel to the streetcar line, everyone was gazing up at the tall buildings and the blue sky—the last time we would see it on our trip.

 “This really is a beautiful city,” said Okerlund, who became closely familiar with Portland while growing up in Seattle.

 While the concepts known as “new urbanism” and “smart growth” have no shortage of critics, it’s hard to deny their success in Portland.

 The first thing you notice about Portland’s downtown, the Central City, is the 15’-wide sidewalks, and the short blocks—about three-fourths the length of what you find in New York City or Washington, D.C. Leafy trees, sculptures, benches and outdoor cafes line the streets. Buses cruise along in wide lanes that prohibit cars.

 Portland’s downtown streets illustrate the “small and calculated” moves that Bunster-Ossa proposed during Charlottesville’s transportation summit to create a pedestrian-friendly environment. Stand on any corner in Portland and look up and down the blocks in all four directions—everything you see invites you to walk and explore.

 Because the city controls the size and shape of buildings, you can always see the sky, and daylight streams down to the sidewalks, through the canopy of trees. Every block offers places to congregate and rest, shop windows to peek through and the feeling of safety that comes from seeing other people on the street. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, the short blocks mean you will soon come to another intersection, with three new pathways to choose among.

 Portland’s streetcar runs a two-mile loop between the Good Samaritan Hospital at one end and Portland State University at the other. Along the way it passes ultra-modern condominiums situated along streets like Flanders, Lovejoy and Montgomery—names that have since been immortalized in “The Simpsons.”

 The streetcar stops 32 times along its route. LED displays in each shelter tell you when the next car will arrive. The streetcar is so silent, running on electricity delivered by overhead lines, it can almost sneak up on you. The cars are sleek and brightly colored. The station is slightly raised so passengers don’t need to step up when they board the streetcar through the wide, sliding doors. The cars have large windows and a place to hang bicycles. Riders can choose to sit or stand and grip poles or hanging straps.

 The streetcar’s intersection with bus and light rail routes, plus the bicycle hangers, impressed Charlottesville Mayor David Brown. “It lets people integrate different modes of transportation,” he says. He says he was pleasantly surprised that the overhead wires powering the streetcar were not as ugly and intrusive as he expected.

 On the first afternoon of our visit, a blue streetcar pulled up to the stop. The Charlottesville group piled on and immediately identified themselves as tourists by gathering around the electronic fare box near the streetcar door, and trying to figure out how to feed it dollar bills.

 Locals, it seems, rarely pay for their ride. About half of the streetcar line is free, and in the rest of the line, enforcement is lax.

 “I’ve ridden for a year-and-a-half, and I’ve never seen them check for fares,” says 21-year-old Christina Keef, a student at Portland State University. She seemed like a veteran rider, casually leaning against the wall, reading a book while Charlottesville’s rookie riders swayed and grabbed for the leather straps that hang from the ceiling as the streetcar took off.

 Keef, who lives along the streetcar route and rides it to school, says she purchased an annual pass for $75. Gustafson says the streetcar collects about $90,000 a year in fares “on the honor system.”

 Fred Leeson, a reporter who covers transit for Portland’s local newspaper, The Oregonian, says the streetcar “works pretty well.” Keef agrees. “I like it, but it needs to be expanded,” she says. “It doesn’t go where I need to go for work.”

 Critics of the streetcar system say that Portland could have spent the nearly $60 million on a better bus system that would do just as good a job at moving people.

 “It’s just a goofy little tourist thing,” says John Charles, an environmental policy analyst for the Cascade Institute, a leading critic of smart growth initiatives.

 “For $30 million a mile, Portland could have bought buses like Mick Jagger tours on,” says Charles. “They could be powered by solar energy, serve coffee, and the city still would have saved money. Rubber-tire buses could do the job cheaper, faster and better.”

 Perhaps that’s true. But streetcar advocates say that, frankly, many people think buses are for losers. Those people will choose to ride a streetcar, however, because it has a more open, stylish feel. “It’s like the difference between taking the bus to New York and taking the train,” says Mayor Brown. “It just feels different.”

 As further evidence, Todd Gordon of Okerlund and Associates points to Tacoma, which recently built a streetcar along a route formerly traversed by conventional buses. When the streetcar was introduced in Tacoma, ridership on the route tripled.

 Indeed, the streetcar is a key feature in the marketing literature for Portland’s Hoyt Street Properties, the premier developer of condominiums along the streetcar line in the newly renovated Pearl District. In fact, Homer Williams, a partner in Hoyt Street Properties, was one of Portland’s first proponents of a streetcar. At a time when the city desperately wanted to increase density downtown, Williams agreed to build condominiums that were taller and denser than market forces justified—if the city agreed to build a streetcar.

 “Condominium sales had been low,” says Portland Streetcar CEO Gustafson. “Portland had not been a good place to invest in condominiums. It was very definitely a risk [for Williams],” he says.

 Portland agreed to Williams’ conditions. Property and business owners formed a nonprofit company, Portland Streetcar, Inc., to build and operate the streetcar system.

 Charlottesville’s Mayor Brown, who attended chiropractor school in Portland between 1978 and 1982, marveled at the transformation in The Pearl, where gleaming new condominiums, with a modern design that alludes to the area’s industrial origins, dominate the skyline.

 “It used to be real seedy down there,” says Brown. “I wish we could have had more local developers on this trip, to see the kind of architecture they’re doing out there.”

 The only Charlottesville developer who made the trip was Frank Stoner, vice president of Stonehaus Development. His firm has already been a pioneer of modern architecture in Charlottesville, with projects like the Belmont Lofts. Stoner snapped lots of pictures of the Pearl’s sleek, powerful buildings.

 In Charlottesville, however, the conventional wisdom is that people with money want big houses with big yards. Stoner says it will be difficult convincing local developers to take the risks inherent in building luxury condos.

 “On an emotional level, I love the whole idea,” says Stoner. “It speaks to the idea of what Charlottesville wants to be.

 “But this type of development is not easy money,” he says. “The return won’t be there on the first project. The hope is that you can establish some momentum. Once it got going in Portland, it probably exceeded their expectations.”

 

Welcome to Ecotopia

 While Portland and Charlottesville share some similar sensibilities, the differences between the two cities go far beyond Portland’s rainy winters and plethora of strip clubs. Oregon’s statewide political scene so differs from Virginia that making Portland’s smart-growth ideas take root here will require more than just faith and enthusiasm—it will take financial wizardry and a political will of steel.

 Portland, population 540, 000, has a reputation as an “ecotopia” 40 years in the making. According to Ethan Seitzer, who researches Portland’s urban evolution at Portland State University, by the mid-1960s people in Oregon were starting to get fed up with the big highways and sprawling suburbs they perceived to be destroying their neighborhoods.

 At that time, Jane Jacobs published the classic, some would say subversive, planning tome, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. People who had spent the past decade protesting the Vietnam War began directing their activism toward the development of their own city.

 The backlash against highways and suburban sprawl convinced Oregon’s legislature to mandate a pair of controversial growth-control measures, both of which still stand out nationally as radical steps to preserve farmland and city neighborhoods.

 The first is an urban growth boundary—a ring around the Portland area, which comprises 24 cities and three counties, outside which no new development is allowed. Any builder wanting to work in Portland must either find vacant land inside the boundary or redevelop land that’s already in use.

 Oregon legislators also required Portland to adopt a planning organization that would have authority over the cities and counties inside Portland’s growth boundary. The planning group, which came to be called Metro, had an elected leadership and a staff of planners. Metro built Portland’s light rail system and required that new development be built adjacent to the train lines to encourage the public’s use of transit. The Charlottesville equivalent of Metro would be if our regional Metropolitan Planning Organization could force its will on—rather than just advocate to—local governments.

 While Portland’s Metro was approved by popular referendum, it was not universally lauded.

 “Portland isn’t any different than any other city in terms of how repulsed existing residents are about increasing density,” says Rick Gustafson, who became Metro’s first executive director in 1979. He says Portland had the same argument many cities (including Charlottesville) have about growth, the debate between people who advocate growth at all costs and trumpet private property rights as the highest good, and those who favor slowing and ultimately stopping growth to preserve the quality of life for those lucky (and rich) enough to make it inside before the gate closes.

 Oregon’s land use laws forced people to adopt a third perspective, Gustafson says, a consideration of the “regional form” of Portland.

 “We had to find a way to integrate different types of housing,” he says. “It fostered innovation and creativity. It created a whole different type of living environment, this idea of communal life. You gave up your personal space, but you upgraded your quality of life.”

 To control housing prices, Portland offers lucrative tax breaks for developers to adopt rent controls. Gustafson says this has actually created a glut of affordable housing. For example he says he owns an apartment building with 96 units, half of which are priced so that someone earning 60 percent of Portland’s median income will spend about 30 percent of their monthly earning on rent. All 48 of his market-rate units are full, while his affordable units are only 80 percent full.

 In Oregon, as in Virginia, growth controls are continually under assault from conservative think tanks like the Cascade Policy Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, as well as political action committees formed by the Homebuilder’s Association, auto dealers and real estate agents. The difference is that in Oregon, the public’s demand for smart growth outweighs the political clout of homebuilders and auto dealers.

 “There’s no question that Portland is very liberal, and there is a mentality in favor of public planning,” says Gustafson. In Oregon, as in Virginia, the Homebuilder’s Association is a top political donor that opposes smart growth. Gustafson says Portland’s leaders decided it was in their city’s best interest essentially to ignore the association’s cries for less regulation.

 “More builders in Portland now are not members of the Homebuilder’s Association,” Gustafson says. “Traditional homebuilder types chose not to build in Portland.”

 Charlottesville might like to adopt a similar stance toward conventional homebuilding. The question is, will we be able to get the same kind of support from Virginia’s General Assembly?

 After the delegation met with Gustafson on one of those days in Portland where the rain doesn’t exactly fall from the sky as much as it seems to seep up from the earth, former City Councilor Meredith Richards summarized Charlottesville’s chances of getting a load of help from the Commonwealth— “It will be damn hard,” she said.

 

Could it happen here?

Now that the delegation has returned to Charlottesville, they’re trying to revivify the enthusiasm from the trip.

 Most of the delegation seems to agree on one point—impressive as Portland’s success appears, Oregon’s political climate and Portland itself are so different from Charlottesville that the strategy cannot be simply transplanted to Virginia.

 “It would have to evolve differently in our setting,” says planner and architecture professor Ken Schwartz. “But I came away very encouraged.”

 Schwartz and others say there are two big lessons that Charlottesville can learn from Portland. One is that land use and transportation can be coordinated to create lucrative real estate developments that the free market alone might not otherwise produce.

 On W. Main, for example, Schwartz points out that better transit would mean developers would have to include less parking in their projects, which means they could use the extra space for more residential units, which would, in turn, increase profit.

 Furthermore, Frank Stoner says he was encouraged by Portland’s example of how public-private partnerships can encourage better development. The tax credits that Portland gives to developers and consumers who invest in condominiums “is a huge incentive,” Stoner says.

 When private business create a nonprofit company to partner with the government, says Schwartz, “it gives elected officials a mandate” to pursue innovation that politicians alone might not have the courage to undertake.

 Yet no one in the delegation believes a streetcar will happen anytime soon in Charlottesville. Portland’s streetcar was funded from a wide array of sources, including increased parking fees, bonds, extra taxes that businesses agreed to bear and government grants. Before Charlottesville wades into such a complex process, transit experts say a slow-but-steady approach is needed.

 Councilor Kevin Lynch and ACCT president Susan Pleiss says the logical first step is reforming the bus system. Lynch has long advocated a “backbone and feeder” system, with more buses running up and down W. Main Street. Lynch also advocates borrowing some of the streetcar’s technology—such as displays that tell waiting passengers when the next bus will arrive, and equipment that allows drivers to turn red lights green.

 “Now is not the time to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ on a streetcar,” says Pleiss. “It’s important for a wide variety of people to know that the vision is out there, and what it would mean for Charlottesville to have something like this.”

 Pleiss says that while streetcars and high-rise condominiums on W. Main may be 10 years away, it’s good for locals to know what is possible. That way, she says, as the City and County move forward on reforming transit, we don’t do something so expensive that it would put a streetcar out of reach for the future. “We don’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot,” she says.

 Ultimately, though, changing the environment of W. Main will come down to money. It will be tough for the City to finance such innovation all alone, says Albemarle planner Juandiego Wade. “But if we’re talking about taxing the County, we’re going to have to work on getting their buy-in.”

 Still, Wade says, “I don’t see any critical barriers. If there’s a will, it can happen.”

 Former Mayor Cox agrees. He says the City should add “layers” of improvement to W. Main, beginning with pedestrian amenities, then adding better transit and high-density development. While it took Portland 20 years to produce the streetcar, the ever-optimistic Cox predicts Charlottesville can do it in half that time.

 “You’re seeing the beginning of the movement that will push Charlottesville to do something different,” he says.Who’s on board

 

Want to know more about a streetcar in Charlottesville?
Here’s a list of the people who took the field trip to Portland

Guides:

Gary Okerlund, Todd Gordon – architects at Okerlund and Associates

Group one:

John Borgmeyer—C-VILLE reporter

Marlene Denckla—citizen

Karen Firehock—City planning commissioner

Kevin Lynch—City councilor

Susan Pleiss—ACCT president

Meredith Richards—former City councilor, statewide rail and transit advocate

Kenneth Schwartz—UVA professor of architecture

Frank Stoner—real estate developer

Juandiego Wade—County transportation planner

William Watterson—City transit manager

Group two:

Alia Anderson—ACCT staff

David Brown—City mayor

Wayne Cilimberg—County director of planning

Maurice Cox—former City councilor

William Lucy—UVA professor of urban planning

Judith Mueller—City director of public works

Rob Schilling—City councilor

Michael Smith—student intern

Karen Waters—Quality

Community Council

Jeff Werner—Piedmont

Environmental Council

Rebecca White—UVA director of transportation

 

When Melissa Howard joined the Wal-Mart store in New Castle, Indiana, in 1992, she received a blue vest, a red, white and blue nametag, six bucks an hour, and the title of “electronics department manager.” Howard hoped to climb the corporate ladder, accept greater responsibility and take home a fatter paycheck.

 So she worked diligently and her performance evaluations reflected that: The reviews rated much of her work as “exceeds expectations,” the top ranking allowed. Howard says that in the space set aside for her comments, “I wrote that my long-term goals were to work my way up the ladder to store manager, district manager and ultimately regional manager.”

 After several years at Wal-Mart, Howard became a store manager, joining a small group of women who held that title. Not only was she a store manager by 1999, she was asked to open a brand new Supercenter in Bluffton, Indiana. “The Supercenter was the up-and-coming thing,” Howard says. To be asked to open one meant “prestige.” She likened it to the difference between driving a Ford and a Cadillac. “It was just a major accomplishment.”

 She was now on the top rung of responsibility inside a store, yet she wasn’t earning the top salary. That honor went to two men who reported to Howard as co-managers at the Supercenter. One man with no Wal-Mart work experience, she claims, was making $15,000 more a year and getting three weeks of vacation, a perk Howard only got after seven years at Wal-Mart. The other man, Howard says, was “hired off the street for $10,000 more than I was making.”

 Although the store opening was successful, Howard’s own career was headed for trouble. In March 2000, some stores in her district were experiencing high shrink, and inventory was disappearing because of theft or sloppy paperwork. She was told her Supercenter wasn’t a problem, but a store she’d managed months earlier was struggling with inventory loss.

 Several managers, district managers and loss prevention managers were summoned to the corporate offices in Bentonville, Arkansas, for a meeting. On the trip, some of the men decided to stop at a roadside strip club. Despite her instincts, Howard says she felt it best to go into the club rather than sit alone in a dark parking lot off a highway.

 “I tried to ignore the show, but at one point,” Howard says in an affidavit, “I was approached by one of the strippers and District Manager Kevin Washburn proposed that he pay one of the strippers $50 to have a ‘threesome out back’ with me.”

 Shocked, she refused. But she didn’t complain to higher-ups at Wal-Mart. Managers, she alleges, routinely went to strip clubs during annual meetings. Moreover, she says, the last time she objected, in 1994, to what she felt was belittling treatment from John Waters, a regional vice president, she was told she needed to learn to “take the shit and let it roll.”

 In any case, the return trip wasn’t much different. There was another stop at a strip club in Missouri and, she says, some of the men planned to visit a massage parlor.

 

Step down “voluntarily”

Two months later, Howard realized that lap dances, massage parlors and invitations to a threesome would be the least of her problems. That’s when John Waters was named as her new district manager. (He’d been demoted from regional vice president.) “At our first meeting, he made a point of telling me, in a less than friendly tone, that he ‘remembered’ me,” claims Howard.

 On June 16, 2000, she says, he called her and told her she needed to step down. Howard drove 30 miles to meet with him. In an affidavit, Howard recalls: “He told me that a woman should not be running a Wal-Mart store and that I ‘needed to be home raising my daughter.’ He instructed me to step down ‘voluntarily’ and to tell my employees at the morning meeting that having this new Supercenter was too stressful for a single parent and that I needed to take a break.”

 Though her store was “running in the black”—unusual for a new Supercenter—she says Waters wanted her out. If she didn’t quit, she alleges that he told her he’d make her life “hell.”

 “I had no choice but to step down,” Howard says.

 He also wanted her out of his district. She was assigned to a co-manager position in a store 120 miles away. Meanwhile, she claims the regional personnel manager told her to stay away from her old Supercenter; her presence in the store was undermining the new store manager’s “ability to succeed.”

 Soon after, Howard says Waters accused her of having sex with an employee, something forbidden by Wal-Mart’s anti-fraternization rules. She vehemently denied the claim. The company investigated and cleared her of any wrongdoing.

 By late summer of 2000, Howard felt battered: She had stepped down as a store manager, left the Supercenter she’d worked hard to open, been assigned a two-hour commute, and endured a humiliating investigation into her sexual conduct.

 Howard was no longer able to take the shit and roll with it. “I knew at that point that I had to leave Wal-Mart,” she says. And so she did.

 

“Retail is for Housewives”

Less than a year after Howard resigned, a gender discrimination class action lawsuit was filed against Wal-Mart in San Francisco federal court. It claims that Wal-Mart discriminated against female employees and that women were paid less than men in similar positions, even with higher performance ratings and more seniority. And it claims that women weren’t promoted to in-store management positions as often as men and when they were, they waited longer to advance.

 In short, it says that Wal-Mart has two career ladders—a well-paying, far-reaching one for men and a limited, lower-wage one for women. Affidavits filed in court by women allege that:

 

• Women with years of experience and good work records were repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of men with little or no experience.

• Women seeking advancement were treated differently than men; they were asked to work night shifts for two years as assistant manager before being considered for store manager or were asked to show they could repeatedly lift 50-pound bags of dry dog food.

• Women working in personnel were fired when they complained that men were consistently paid more than women for the same job.

• Some women were told men were being paid more because men had “families to support” or that “men are here to make a career and women aren’t. Retail isfor housewives who just need to earn extra money.”

 

The plaintiffs also compiled compelling statistics: Among cashiers and greeters, 65 percent were women; among salaried assistant managers, a more modest 35 percent were women; among co-managers, less than 25 percent. And among store managers, only 14 percent were women. And they filed expert testimony that there is a clear record of under-promoting women in “nearly every geographic region,” and that the women of Wal-Mart are paid less than men nationwide. For hourly employees, the wage gap is $1,100 and among salaried jobs, women make $14,500 less than men. Statistics are the backbone of a request for class action status; in this case, the class could mean 1.6 million women, making it the largest such suit ever certified.

 Wal-Mart’s response has been somewhat predictable: The numbers are flawed because comparisons should be made store-by-store or within each department of each store, and not company-wide. And incredibly, Wal-Mart, a company that critics charge routinely uses its sheer size to get what it wants, argues that the big class of plaintiffs makes the case unmanageable. In other words, Wal-Mart was suggesting a size cap on class-action lawsuits.

 U.S. District Court Judge Martin J. Jenkins didn’t buy it. In his opinion handed down in June, he wrote, “Insulating our nation’s largest employers from allegations that they have engaged in a pattern and practice of gender or racial discrimination—simply because they are large—would seriously undermine these imperatives.”

 Jenkins handed the women a significant victory, granting class action status for all women working at any Wal-Mart retail store in the United States since December 26, 1998, who have been, or might be, subject to the alleged discriminatory pay and promotion practices.

 Wal-Mart immediately released a statement: “Let’s keep in mind that today’s ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the case. Judge Jenkins is simply saying he thinks it meets the legal requirements necessary to move forward as a class action. We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal.”

 When we contacted Wal-Mart for this story and submitted written questions as asked, we received no response.

 

The dog food bag test

When Claudia Renati took a job in 1993 as a membership team leader for Pace Membership Warehouse, Inc., in Roseville, California, her family needed the paycheck. She’d been working in real estate when the market dropped off. Her husband was out of work for a year because of a job-related injury. The work meant regular income and, she hoped, advancement opportunities.

 Soon after she started, Wal-Mart bought Pace and converted the store to a Sam’s Club, and “they made you believe that it was even so much easier and a much better organization that you could, that anybody could, move up and be in management and move on to running your own club if you wanted to,” Renati says.

 The reality proved different for her. For several years she appealed in vain to Wal-Mart’s management for a promotion. She says she had above average or exceptional evaluations, no disciplinary action, and time records that were “squeaky clean.” But it was never good enough to get promoted. “There was constantly a barrier,” she claims.

 In 1994, after the regional sales manager left the company, Renati was put in charge of “running the region and doing all the ads and marketing programs. I completed all the tasks of a Regional Sales Manager for two years without the proper title or pay.”

 Yet, when she approached the director of operations about a promotion, Renati says she was told that she couldn’t have it because she hadn’t completed the management-training program. When she asked about entering the program, she alleges, “He told me that I would have to be willing to sell my house and move to Alaska.”

 Wal-Mart has a policy of requiring people to move around the country if they want to move up in the company. But with a husband who had 30 years invested in his job, Renati says moving wasn’t a real option, so she remained the marketing team leader. By 2000, she had trained approximately 20 marketing managers, “all of whom were male and many of whom never went through the training program.”

 But then Wal-Mart violated its own policy, she says, when several men in her store climbed up the management ranks without moving—to Alaska or anywhere else. A meat cutter became a general manager, a floor team leader was promoted to general manager, a team leader became a merchandise manager. And she watched a number of management training candidates filter through Sam’s Club. The candidate profile, Renati claims, is “usually a white male between 27 and 35.”

 In 2000, while out for six weeks for knee surgery, Renati says she was told that her department was being combined with another and that a man would head the new department. Her job was being eliminated. Her new post was as a meat wrapper. But while out on sick leave later that year, she was replaced by a man and moved to the membership desk.

 There, she got a not-so-pleasant surprise. “I discovered that my supervisor at the membership desk was someone whom I had previously supervised for six years,” she says. Fed up, she quit.

 Then, in 2001, she was asked to return and sell credit at the membership desk. When she asked about promotional opportunities, she was told she’d be given a chance. She signed up to work.

 In 2002 she asked to become the photo manager, but a male cashier with six months of experience got the job. When she approached the operations director and explained that she’d spent nine years at Sam’s Club and had little advancement, she says he asked if she could stack 50-pound bags of dog food. She could not.

 “He told me there was nothing he could do for me because before I could become a manager, I would have to be Floor Team Leader and that requires stacking 50-pound bags of dog food,” Renati claims.

 And yet she knew of several male managers who didn’t have to be a floor team leader first or were not required to pass the 50-pound dog food bags test.

 In 2002, Renati quit a second and final time. She says of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club: “It is run by good old boys. They make and break their money off the backs of the women employees.”

 

 

Pro-subsidy, anti-union

Ironically, founder Sam Walton’s rules for building a retail business include valuing “associates” and sharing rewards. Last year, Wal-Mart generated $265 billion in revenue and had about $9.1 billion in net income. Today there are 5,000 stores in 10 countries, including Argentina, South Korea and China. When Walton died in 1992, he was second only to Bill Gates for title of the world’s richest man.

 The impressive growth has come at a high price. In May, Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research center that promotes corporate and government accountability, released a report showing Wal-Mart received more than $1 billion in subsidies from local and state governments, including sales tax rebates, free or reduced-priced land, tax-increment-financing, state corporate income tax credits and property tax abatements. The study was partially funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

 Labor unions have their own fight to pick with Wal-Mart. Although the UFCW recently won accreditation and the right to represent employees in a Quebec Wal-Mart, it has yet to successfully organize in the United States. In 2000, meat cutters in a Jacksonville, Texas, store voted to organize and shortly after that the company announced it was closing the department. Wal-Mart’s official position on unions is: “We do not believe there is a need for third-party representation.”

 Represented or not, workers have leveled other charges against Wal-Mart. The company has been hit by a wave of class action suits alleging that it requires its employees to work “off the clock,” a violation of the Fair Labor Standards and Practices Act. Wal-Mart is also being sued in several courts over its practice of taking out life insurance policies on Wal-Mart employees. Under the company’s Corporate-Owned Life Insurance program, the company—not the employee’s surviving family—is financially compensated if the worker dies. Wal-Mart settled lawsuits in Texas and New Hampshire but others are pending.

 And in August, the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley released a report claiming that Wal-Mart’s low wages and inadequate benefits in California cost the state $86 million a year in state aid.

 But eclipsing them all is Dukes et al. vs. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the class action gender discrimination suit that includes women like Melissa Howard and Claudia Renati. This is a case that could do serious damage to the company. In its annual report released before the class certification ruling earlier this summer, Wal-Mart warned that if the class is certified, a settlement is reached, or it loses the case, “the resulting liability could be material to the Company, as could employment-related injunctive measures, which would result in increased costs of operation on an ongoing basis.”

 

The fight goes on

Melissa Howard and Claudia Renati have found there is life beyond Wal-Mart. Howard is a customer-relations specialist in Indianapolis making less than what she did when she stepped down as a Supercenter store manager. A single mom, Howard says, “it has not been the easiest, but I did what I had to do.”

 Renati is now the executive director of Lincoln Arts, a nonprofit public arts organization in Lincoln, California. Says Renati: “This is the 21st Century, this is not the 1950s coming out of World War II.” Women “need to be recognized as being intelligent, smart individuals who can run an organization—because I do here.”

 Since the case was filed in 2001, Wal-Mart has made a few changes—some substantive, some in public relations. It scrapped the “tap on the shoulder” method for deciding who gets to join the management-in-training program and has set up a formal application process. The company opened a diversity office which is supposed to help it “recruit and promote from all segments of society,” according to its annual report. And it launched a PR campaign touting Wal-Mart as a great place for advancement and a good paycheck.

 That’s not what Debra Smith hears these days. A staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Equal Rights Advocates, one of the firms representing women in the lawsuit, Smith says that current Wal-Mart employees who are involved in the suit are “very scared.”

 Says Smith: “I have several who call me once a month or once a quarter who tell me about the latest incident that they’re afraid is going to get them terminated and they feel they’re being set up for termination.”

 And some of those stories may end up in the court file as the case moves towards a trial.

 

 

Cents and sensibility
Social justice values aside, there’s no denying the good deals at Wal-Mart. Pay your money, make your choice

Fifty dollars. It’ll buy dinner out for two, sans appetizers, alcohol and dessert. You can play a round of golf at Birdwood or fill up your SUV. Doesn’t seem like all that much, does it?

 But point that SUV north on Route 29, hang a left on Hilton Heights Road and before you can say Ulysses S. Grant, you’re searching for a parking spot in the immense lot of Wal-Mart, where 50 bucks still means something.

 On a recent Tuesday morning, the place is jammed with hundreds of the Wal-Mart faithful. And we in Charlottesville aren’t the only ones on the prowl for a bargain or two. The retail behemoth averages more than 100 million customers a week, and at last count, there were 5,000 Wal-Mart stores in 10 countries. Last year, the chain netted about $9.1 billion on $265 billion in sales. Its electronic doors slide open every day at 6am, and don’t stop whooshing back and forth until midnight.

 Once inside those doors, a friendly senior citizen welcomes me, and, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a four-foot-tall plastic skeleton break into a dancing rendition of “Super Freak.” Halloween candy, I think, and take my first right.

 I’m immediately waylaid, however, by a display of Diet Coke (12 cans for $2.50, compared with $4.29 at Giant). Also into my cart goes a box of Special K cereal ($2.50), Chunky chicken noodle soup ($1.50 a can), a pound of Kraft mini marshmallows ($1.27), a 34.5-ounce can of Maxwell House Master Blend coffee ($3.97) and a gallon of Hawaiian Punch ($1.97). And then there’s the Halloween candy (a pound of mini Hershey bars for $3.94).

 I can’t resist a $1.50 pair of panties and a $2.50 bra. I grab a bottle of Dawn dish soap ($1.97), Purex laundry detergent (100 ounces for $2.74), Lysol toilet bowl cleaner ($1.66), Kleenex tissues ($1.88 for 120), a roll of Mardi Gras paper towels (97¢), a four-pack of soft white light bulbs (77¢) and zipper seal sandwich bags (50 for 97¢). I strain my back hoisting 25 pounds of kitty litter ($2.76) into my cart, followed by 20 pounds of Ol’ Roy dog food ($6.97).

 Before heading for the checkout, I snag some hunter’s knit gloves (two six-packs for $4) and Remington plastic 20-gauge shotgun shells ($2.98 for a box of 25). I’ve got to be certain about these babies, though, because a sign above them warns me “all ammunition sales are final.”

 According to my calculations, I should have enough of my $50 bill left over for a couple of gumballs from the machines near the exit.—Susan Sorensen

 

Writings on the Wal
Want to know more about the class action sex discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart?

 Check these URLs out and inform yourself.

www.walmartclass.com/walmartclass94.pl

This is the official Wal-Mart Class Website. Any female employee who has worked at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club since December 26, 1998, can refer to this website to determine whether she has legal claims in the class action sex discrimination lawsuit. The suit alleges discrimination against women in promotions, jobs assignments, training and pay. Keep track of the lawsuit and view press releases, complaints and answers to frequently asked questions here. Informative profiles of the seven firms and numerous attorneys working on this case are also available.

 
www.walmartstores.com/wmstore/wmstores/HomePage.jsp

The class action lawsuit is mentioned on the official Wal-Mart homepage. Enter the website and click on the “Investor Information” tab. Then find the 2004 Annual Report (bottom right-hand corner). Chapter 8, “Litigation,” contains the company’s response to investors’ concerns: “The complaint seeks, among other things, injunctive relief, compensatory damages including front pay and back pay, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees… If the court certifies a class in this action and there is an adverse verdict on the merits, or in the event of a negotiated settlement of the action, the resulting liability could be material to the Company, as could employment-related injunctive measures, which would result in increased costs of operations on an ongoing basis.”

 

www.goodjobsfirst.org/

Good Jobs First is a nonprofit research center based in Washington D.C., that helps policy-makers ensure economic development subsidies are accountable and effective. The article, “Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance its Never-Ending Growth,” provides the full report claiming that Wal-Mart has received more than $1 billion in subsidies from local and state governments, including sales tax rebates, free or reduced-priced land, tax-increment-financing, state corporate income tax credits and property tax abatements. The study was partially funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which has targeted Wal-Mart.—Compiled by Kelly Quinley