Max Ebb — “Under a Ladder”
“Nothing to it,” the outgoing commodore assured me. “Everyone moves up a rung on the ladder, and all the committee has to do is find some enthusiastic new member to start out on the bottom rung.”
It seemed like an easy enough assignment, so I agreed to serve on my yacht club’s nominating committee.
“The bottom rung,” the commodore explained, “is the third rear commodore position, in charge of planning club parties and other scheduled social gatherings. They get the contact list from the previous third rear. It’s an easy job for someone new to the Board.”
Well, in theory it was an easy job, but in practice it was a little more complicated. My first thought was new member Leda Horticulture, probably the club’s most enthusiastic and energetic young member. She’s a party animal, but she made it clear she would not attend Board meetings. “Not enough weekday evenings,” she claimed.
To complicate things even more, there were people near the top of the ladder who wanted to get off. Hugo Fast was in charge of the race committee, with assistance from Peg DeMeter. He would move up to vice commodore, in charge of lining up speakers for our dinner meetings. But Hugo wanted out, and Peg wanted to stay on the race committee in her assistant role. Bjorn Toulouse wanted the VC job, probably so he could schedule himself to speak on his favorite topics. But his lecture style was terrible. He was known to read verbatim from his favorite book, Celestial Navigation Made Practically Incomprehensible by Miles B. Hind, for his chalk talks to the advanced junior sailors.
The club membership records are in the library, so my next move was to prepare for what I expected to be a difficult nominating committee meeting. I decided to spend some time looking at the recent membership applications we had on file. Every application lists tasks the prospective member would like to help with, and the special skills they might have, but the data is not compiled in an easily searchable format. Fortunately, I’m old enough to be OK rifling through unsorted hard-copy documents while deciphering handwriting.