Its not yet eleven o’clock and I’m not quite ready to turn in so I’ll stick this post in. When I dug out an old column I’d written about getting abused for my work as a school board member another column caught my eye.
Before I’d ever met Keith Dixon I came to his defense. Twice in fact.
Eventually I called him up to have a chat. I wanted to take his measure and I was immediately taken with him. I wanted him to succeed and offered him some insights on how to deal with a couple of difficult board members. In hindsight I suspect my advice was not needed as Dr. Dixon seems to read people very well.
For a year I served on the District endowment foundation with Dr. Dixon’s wife, another very engaging person. They are a handsome couple. As I began to find myself drawn further into the fight over the Red Plan I did not feel comfortable staying on with the endowment and resigned before my term of office was over. In fact, Dr. Dixon joked with me in the early days perhaps before I helped organize Let Duluth Vote that he’d asked Sarah Dixon what he’d done wrong to have me turn on him.
(Ironically, I’d recommended two of the Red Plan’s eventual champions as directors of the Endowment Board, my old friends Bevan Schraw and Judy Punyko-Seliga. Board member Ann Wasson was the Board’s representative on the endowment.)
It was probably a couple month’s into my fight for a vote on the Red Plan before I heard rumors that his Faribault experience ended poorly. I was reluctant to dig into it but eventually I made a couple calls. One of Dixon’s fiercest Faribault critics wrote me an email telling me that the only thing for me to do was to make sure Dixon got fired as soon as I had the chance. I considered this over the top and wrote back that I had no such plans because I had other priorities than feuding with a superintendent. Besides my practical side told me that with his charm Dr. Dixon could help find a compromise for a new building plan that would pass muster with the community.
When the Two Harbors Superintendent threatened me with legal action it reeked of the kind of tactics I was told Dixon had practiced in Faribault. It was something to keep in mind but that was all.
I am perhaps a little sensitive when people treat me like a joke and that may have been Dixon’s first mistake with me. He walked over to me after a school board meeting and laughed in my face. Perhaps he intended it to be jovial but that’s not how I took it. I didn’t much care for his wide grin as he told me his Red Plan was a slam dunk and that nothing could stop it. He may be a master reader of people but goading a eunuch for not having testosterone is a mistake. Especially when the eunuch had the perseverance to run four times in a row for a school board seat before finally winning an election.
I didn’t blog much for six months after I lost the school board election so I can’t point to specific actions recorded at the time that set me further against Dr. Dixon. Certainly the nasty September column Ralph Doty inflicted on me helped harden me. Doty may simply have identified with Dixon but I could easily imagine Dixon putting the bug in Ralph’s ear to hammer the tall nail down.
It was that column as much as anything else that prompted me to publish a somewhat restrained history of Dixon’s days in Faribault and a critique of the process by which he was selected to lead the Duluth schools. Although Dixon has not betrayed any irritation about my columns I knew that they were effectively a gauntlet thrown down. Since I had already deduced that he would never willingly compromise it seemed unimportant that I keep the unpleasant stories to myself even though I knew it would bring down the wrath of Dr. Dixon’s admirers on me.
As any reader can tell after a few visits to my website I empty my brain here. Oh, I don’t shake all the bits out. There are a few tactics that I keep to myself. I see no point in making the contest any tougher than it already is. Otherwise I flatter myself that my posts are a pretty honest reflection of my thinking. I like to think that I tell people what they need to hear. My take on Dr. Dixon is quite different. I think Dr. Dixon tells people what he wants them to hear.
It takes a smarter person than me to keep track of the things they’ve said that bend the truth. I’m only smart enough to remember what I think to be true. Besides, the consequences for being discovered in a lie are too terrible. For instance, Dr. Dixon’s first lie to me has almost completely foreclosed the possibility that I will ever trust him.
