Having only three of us on the Society’s Board of Directors did not seem enough, so Williams, Zuckerman, and I agreed that we should expand the Board.
I had gotten to know Rowan Wakefield, who was then head of the State University of New York’s Washington office. Wakefield had had a lot of practical experience with boards, and his office was on the next block from my own, so he and I could easily meet and discuss the Society’s problems. I thought Wakefield would be a useful Board member and invited him to meet with us. We later elected him as our first non-officer Board member.
The successful recruitment of our second Board member was thanks to Sally’s networking skills — one of my wife’s many contributions to the Society. She had volunteered to run a table for the Society during a meeting of humanistic psychologists at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington. The hotel allowed her to have a table in the main corridor — a prime spot for catching the eye of people passing through the hotel’s lobby between Connecticut Avenue and Seventeenth Street. For instance, one of the passersby who got interested in the Society was Arthur Shostak, a sociology professor at the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia. When I went to the hotel to see how Sally and her exhibit were faring, Art was sitting on a table in the Mayflower lobby reading Society literature, and so began our long association. Art soon became the mainstay of the Society’s Philadelphia chapter.
Another interested passerby happened to be Carl H. Madden, chief economist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose very imposing building was located only a few blocks away. Madden had left the hotel by the time I arrived, but I was very excited that someone prominent in the business community was interested in the Society, and I soon got to know him.
Madden proved to be a tall, heavy-set man with a gentle, good-humored manner. A former dean of business at Lehigh University, he was not only keenly interested in the Society, but also exceptionally thoughtful, well connected, open minded, and judicious — just the sort of person we needed to help us make wise decisions. Rowan Wakefield already knew him, and our new four-member Board quickly approved our recruiting him as a Board member.
We also agreed to invite Michael Michaelis and Barbara Marx Hubbard to be Board members. We had found Mike to be a very helpful member of the Society’s Advisory Council, and he was well connected with people in government, business, and academia. I was naturally enthusiastic about Barbara as a Board member — and so were the other members of the Board who had met her — so she, too, was invited to join.
By this time, I was very pleased at our success in getting Board members. I only recall one turn-down — Harvey Perloff, a member of Daniel Bell’s Commission on the Year 2000, felt he was already overworked — so I raised my sights. It would be wonderful if we could recruit some people who were not merely distinguished, but really prominent in the American or, better, the world community.
My friend Lester R. Brown was a close associate of Orville L. Freeman, a former governor of Minnesota who had become U.S. secretary of agriculture under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. I also knew that, after the 1968 election, Freeman had become president of EDP Technologies, the firm that Peter Zuckerman worked for. That gave us two connections to Freeman.
Could we — dare we — invite Freeman to be a Board member? We decided it was worth a try. Brown had become a member of the Society, so I could use him as a reference in soliciting a meeting with Freeman.
Freeman received me very kindly, and we discussed the Society. I asked him if he would be willing to serve on our Board of Directors.
“Let me think about it,” Freeman responded.
About two weeks later I got a letter from him saying he was willing to join our Board. I was overjoyed.
This success got me thinking that maybe — just maybe — we could also recruit Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist who was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. His presence on our Board would clearly establish the Society’s legitimacy in the scientific community.
With the help of Seaborg’s speechwriter, Stanley Schneider, I had gotten Seaborg to address an early meeting of our Society’s Washington members. So I appealed to Schneider for help in getting Seaborg to become a director.
Seaborg agreed to see me, and Schneider led me to his office. Seaborg listened very sympathetically while I discussed what we were doing to build the Society, and he agreed to become a director.
I left his office in a state of great joy and excitement, but I also was pondering two things Seaborg said that surprised me: Near the end of our conversation I asked him if he had any advice for us. Since he was new to the Society, I didn’t expect him to say much in response to my question, but he leaned forward and said, very emphatically, “Keep up the editorial quality in the publication (i.e., THE FUTURIST).”
I was surprised at the seriousness with which he offered this advice, but as I thought it over, I decided that Seaborg was quite right: Editorial quality would be critical to our success, so we had to do all we could to maintain it.
The second comment that surprised me came earlier after I described how we had gone about establishing the Society. He said simply, “That shows real dedication.”
Later I decided that Seaborg was quite right about that, too: Dedication can make up for a lot of deficiencies. Those of us who were trying to build the Society were dedicated to our task, and that might make up for the fact that we had no money, no real office, no official backing, nothing much at all but ourselves and our dedication.