Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas

Author:J. Anthony Lukas [Lukas, J. Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, Sociology, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780307823755
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1985-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There were times when Joan Diver wearied of the delicate balancing of private want and public weal that life in the South End demanded; at such moments, she was grateful for a career which required dispassionate judgments, with nothing personal at stake, about what was good for the community at large.

As long as she could remember, Joan had wanted to work for the poor and disadvantaged. She supposed it was something she had inherited from her father, who had nurtured it in her with a subtle blend of praise and prodding. Her first jobs, in the Radcliffe and Emerson College development offices, had done nothing to satisfy that need—raising money from “fat cat” alumnae for capital improvement wasn’t her idea of humanitarian endeavor, particularly since neither college was greatly involved in the community. Joan wanted work that would have a direct impact on the lives of ordinary people.

In late 1969, nearly a year before the Divers moved to the South End, a friend suggested that she explore the foundation world, and she talked with Bert Waters, director of the Associated Foundation of Greater Boston, a recently formed league of the city’s private philanthropies. No position was available, but Waters kept her name on file, and a year later he called to say that a job had opened up—part-time secretary at the Hyams Trust, Boston’s second-largest foundation. In November 1970, Joan saw Bill Swift, a partner at the old Yankee law firm of Hutchins & Wheeler, who was Hyams’ managing trustee. At the start it wouldn’t be much of a challenge for a bright college graduate, Swift said apologetically—answering the phone, opening mail, and drawing up the agenda for board meetings, which were held every six weeks between September and June. But the board was thinking of expanding the job to include research on potential grantees.

The job seemed exactly right to Joan. With Ned barely a year old and Brad only three, she couldn’t accept full-time work, but as the boys grew older, she’d be able to take on more, and she felt confident that she could handle anything the board assigned her. Moreover, she was intrigued by philanthropy on this scale—Hyams supported a broad range of community programs that confronted most of the social ills besetting Boston. She particularly liked the notion of tackling the same urban issues which Colin was addressing a few blocks away at City Hall. So, early in December 1970, Joan became the foundation’s administrative assistant.

In the starchy world of Boston philanthropy, the Hyams Trust was something of an anomaly, rooted not in old Yankee money but in a relatively new Jewish fortune. The Hyamses were Polish Jews who had emigrated to Ireland in the seventeenth century and thence to Boston’s South End. When Godfrey Hyams graduated from Harvard in 1881, the university gave him a position teaching mineralogy, but he was in great demand with mining interests and soon signed on with Henry Rogers’ Amalgamated Copper. One of the era’s most ruthless businessmen, Rogers built

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