Leo's Maxim

Ellen Greene, circa 1953  (1933 - 2006)

Sometime in 1964, I told Mom, Ellen Greene, that I wanted to be a politician.  As an altar boy at that time, she had hoped that I would be a priest instead, nonetheless, about a week or two later, we went to Hudson's Department Store in Detroit where she bought a pictorial book about the Presidents of the United States of America, and she inscribed the words "To a future president, my son Mark."  A few months later,  a letter from the White House arrived to our house, and an actual president's aide had written something along these lines: "Dear Mark: President Johnson thanks you for the fine speech that you wrote for him during this election year, and he told me to express to you his gratitude."  I lost all of these mementos over the years, so the aforementioned written remarks are paraphrasing what I remember.





Mark Greene, circa 1962

I grew up rooting for Kaline, McLain, Wood and McAuliffe (I actually seen McLain whip the Minnesota Twins 8 - 5 three years before he became famous by winning 30 games), but I switched my allegiance from the Tigers to the Cubs the moment my mother decided to uproot the family from the city to the country, and thus we were closer to the Windy City than the Motor City.  Now, I was rooting for Williams, Banks, Santo and Hands.  It was there that I learned of this unruly, old-school manager of the Cubs named Leo Durocher. You know the type: womanizing, spits tobacco, growls, bad-tempered, kicks dirt on umpires, yells at the players, and so on.  It was Durocher who once said that "Nice guys finish last."





My former parish's (Saint Theresa, Det.) weekly pamphlet - 1964

None of this is in any particular chronological order, but throughout my years in politics I have tried to prove the late "Leo the Lip" wrong, who incidentally
is in the Hall of Fame.  I have been warm, compassionate, friendly, honest to a fault, merciful to opponents whose scandals and peccadillos that I chose not to make a case of; found a run-away beagle while campaigning and gave him or her back to a beaming little boy and his grateful mother; found it very difficult to tell a young Newcastle girl that I could not agree with her optimism about nuclear energy, and then later derided myself for not coming up with a more encouraging response, such as, at least you have a chance to offer new ideas for containing radioactive waste; was given renewed confidence when a little girl gave me her balloon after her mother had refused to sign my petition for Director of Elections; was so proud of my mother when she interrupted my first Congress election debate in Minneapolis as she accused the monitor of being unfair to me, but at the same time quivered at the astonishment of her bold though correct defiance in the face of authority; rushed away in disarray from a downtown Detroit stage with my head down after a crowd of hundreds stood in stony silence after my speech, other than applause from Mom, and polite applause from a few others; and earnestly asked the party workers in Alaska was I doing the right thing by wanting to be a peacemaker instead of wanting to crunch Saddam (I opposed the ['91 and] '03 invasion[s] of Iraq, and the party workers and my '02 campaign manager, Mom, agreed).



I have been humble, respectful and kind to opponents and their supporters alike even when I was being all but hounded out of Minneapolis City Hall by a ward politician who thought he would fit in better with the rowdy antics of Chicago-style aldermen than the formalities of Minnesota nice. Yet, I considered my civility, friendliness and measured passiveness as important to the rule of law and government as elections themselves, so 83% being against me in Newcastle just about proves Mister Durocher right, as I have come to realize that the traits that have been ingrained in me since my earliest days is basically how I see democracy thriving.   In short, respect for society and hope for a better world.

- Mark Greene

Note: More than 50-year-old photographs shown above were a little worn when scanned for computer.

[revised on 2/9/14]