Bill Strickland is in the business of saving lives. After almost 40 years of teaching kids, training adults, and telling his story, he's looking to "franchise" his brand of hope.
For more than 20 years Bill Strickland humped his box of slides around the country. A heavy, awkward little box that was a hassle getting through airport security, that Strickland fretted over constantly in departure lounges, taxicabs, coffee shops, and hotel lobbies, clutching on to it the way Secret Service men latch themselves to the briefcase the President could use to blow up the world if the need arose. Well, Strickland's whole world resided inside his box, too. What he had built lay as much in those pictures -- in the way they helped him enthrall and inspire audiences from the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles to this consultants' conference in Cambridge, Mass. -- as in the Manchester Bidwell Corp. itself back in Pittsburgh.
Nobody used slides anymore, but Strickland thought that he'd earned the right. Diz, Billy Taylor, Monk, the jazz masters on whom he'd patterned his style, all had their crotchets too. He liked the feel of a slide show, the click and chunk, the solid mechanical rhythm. It was tactile, dense, had a certain substance; slides helped him swing. He even worked wry, self-deprecating comments about slides into his routine: Strickland was just an average, old-school kind of guy, the head of a neighborhood job-training and arts center, showing people his slides.
Finally, a year or so ago, Manchester Bidwell's tech staff transferred all the slides to a PowerPoint program, reducing the clunky, pain-in-the-ass box to a single floppy disk that fit in his jacket pocket. Strickland missed his slides at first but soon grew to appreciate the convenience and even the feel of PowerPoint, the liquid shifting of images; a subtly different way to swing.
"It is my privilege and pleasure to present a friend of us all..."
Strickland stands to the crash of applause. He is a tall, loose-limbed man, heavy through the chest and shoulders, with a thick bushy mustache showing flecks of gray. At age 58 he moves with an air of weary grace, like a veteran fullback walking slowly back to the huddle between plays...no, wait a minute, Bill Strickland is not a sports fan. Why is it that people get all excited about a kid smashing into another kid on the football field, he wonders, but not a young man playing a saxophone or a young woman designing a website? So no, not like a fullback...Strickland moves like Thelonius Monk taking the stage at the latter part of his career, when Monk was showing his hard miles, a big man ravaged in body but not in soul, spilling his life into those piano keys.
Strickland scans the audience. Eighty or so people, mostly young nonprofit-sector M.B.A.'s from places like Wharton and Harvard, dressed in slacks and polo shirts. Strickland, for his part, wears a tailored gray business suit. He sees three or four women of color in the audience -- young, willowy, their hair attractively braided -- but no black men. He is the only one at the gathering.
"Over the next few minutes," he begins simply, "I'm gonna show you some pictures of what I do for a living."
Like the first line in a tune Nancy Wilson recorded with Toots Thielmann for MCG Jazz, the record label that is part of Strickland's company: An older man is like fine wine...Nancy breathing that first line as much as singing it, bringing you right in. Strickland aims for that same concise, confiding tone with this audience. The M.B.A.'s stare up at him raptly. Strickland swings into his story.
"It started back in 1965, at Oliver High School in the Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh," he continues. "I was a young kid just about flunking out of school, and one afternoon I happened to walk past the ceramics studio. I glanced inside and here was this man throwing pots. Frank Ross. A Wednesday afternoon. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever seen a ceramics wheel turning, but if you have, you know it's magic. It was like a big invisible hand lifted me up and carried me over to that wheel. Mr. Ross looked up and said, 'Can I help you, son?"
Mr. Ross taught me all about clay. He respected me for who I was. He brought me into his home -- he gave me a key. I remember pasta sauce always cooking on Sunday afternoons and the way the sunlight hit on the hardwood floors. Man, the music from his records just seemed to ride on that light. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane. The music mixing up with the sunlight and the smell of that sauce.
When Miles or Sonny Rollins or one of those other kings came to town, Mr. Ross would take me down to the Crawford Grill in the Hill District to see him. Mr. Ross never preached at me. He would just talk while we threw pots. And as he talked that clay took shape under his hands as if by its own mind. Mr. Ross had a beautiful wife and kids, and his house was always filled with friends and conversation, and the sauce was always cooking. I was 16 years old and I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be Frank Ross.
The women in the audience are especially transfixed: a big, roughed-up-looking black man in a well-cut suit, talking about respect, about common sense and decency, about the dictate that our best hopes must always be acted upon.
As he talks, Strickland's big hands dance in accompaniment, slashing and sculpting the air in front of him. The M.B.A.'s look up at him with fascinated grins. The women in the audience are especially transfixed: a big, roughed-up-looking black man in a well-cut suit, talking about respect, about common sense and decency, about the dictate that our best hopes must always be acted upon, that all people everywhere possess an innate hunger for and right to the sustaining, the good, and the beautiful. Strickland sets that groove and now...now...hits them with the first photo.
