The Adored (2 page)

Barnes looked out from the library window of his home on Shippan Point. Across the harbor, beyond the lighthouse, not more than a half mile away, there were beautiful homes, but behind them, by only several hundred yards, was part of the “blight of Stamford,” as Barnes called it. Waterside and beyond, Southfield. “A ghetto, we’ve built ourselves a ghetto, can you believe it. In Stamford, our “gateway to New England,” a quote he coined heralding the massive construction project his firm had grabbed to transform the city from blue collar town to corporate headquarters city. “It all has to go,” Barnes concluded.

Jonathan Barnes did not have total say as to what would go and what would stay in an ambitious urban renewal plan for Stamford, but as the prime contractor for the city’s redevelopment, his advice was sought and heeded. His company’s reputation for completing quality work, on time, and under budget gave him more leverage than a contractor might otherwise have. Most contractors, in fact, were not interested in the aesthetics of the work but in the profits. Barnes, a sixth-generation Stamfordite, who could trace his roots to a seventeenth century sea captain trading tea out of Stamford harbor, had what he considered a vested interest in, if not an obligation for, Stamford’s future.

In 1920 Parker Barnes Sr. founded the family construction business, two years after he returned from serving as an infantry officer in World War I. He rejected his parents’ wishes that he go to Yale, as each male son in the Barnes family had for four generations. Instead he chose to marry Ellen Sullivan, who waited for him for the two years he was in France in the war. He began as an apprentice carpenter and quickly learned the interrelationships that existed among tradesmen. In 1920 he built his first house with the help of five friends—two masons, a carpenter, a plumber and an electrician. By 1925 he had built forty homes and two office buildings in Stamford. Barnes Construction employed twenty people full time including the five original friends.

In the 1920s the trade union movement was gaining momentum, but Barnes never had union problems. His company was still small, but he generously rewarded his employees with a share in the profits and established retirement plans for all employees, a unique innovation at the time.

It was a result of his work on the two office buildings in 1924 that his business tripled in the next five years. Malcolm Leverett, a wealthy developer and financier in New York City, had decided Stamford, his home town, needed more services for a growing class of rich families. The two buildings commissioned by Leverett, both three stories tall, sat across from one another on Summer Street, just up from the Palace Theater. The town was proud of the buildings, and Leverett relished the attention he received in bringing the new office space to Stamford. A generous man, he heaped praise on young Barnes, began using Barnes Construction on all his projects and recommended him to his colleagues in New York.

It was in 1930 that Parker Barnes took the gamble that established him as a most honorable man and employer. After the great stock market crash of 1929, new building projects came to a halt. In the last half of 1930, Barnes paid his employees, then numbering eighty-five, their full salary from his own pocket. Only one new project, a six-family house, had been built by Barnes over that six-month timeframe. It was over Thanksgiving dinner at his father’s house that he made the request for $40,000. It was enough money, he rationalized, to subsidize his employees’ pay for two years, while enabling him to be the low bidder on a government housing project in the Southfield section of town.

His father, whose fortune was largely intact after the crash, was pleased with his son’s benevolence and pleased he felt comfortable asking for the loan. There had been no animosity between the two over Parker’s decision to mold his life on his own. His father was quite proud of what he had done in service to the country and starting a business without asking for financial help. Even now he was not asking for himself but for his employees.

The loan was made, and Barnes did become the low bidder on the housing project. The work took two full years, and by its completion in January 1933, new construction projects had started flowing again. Barnes Construction employees never forgot what their owner had done, and as it grew in the thirties and forties, Barnes Construction never had the labor problems that beset the industry. In fact, union organizing campaigns highlighted Barnes as the type of employer all construction companies should be, but until such time as that occurred, they proclaimed, unions would always be needed. This was a fact that never sat well with Barnes’ competitors.

Parker Barnes Sr. ran the firm until 1978 and passed the presidency over to his son Jonathan, who at thirty had been in the firm for ten years. While Jonathan had never shown a flair for the people end of running a company, he did have a good head for finance. Parker Sr. felt comfortable turning the business over to his son at this time since three of the original five friends were still with the company as vice presidents. However, when Barnes Sr. died suddenly six months into retirement, the stage was set for Jonathan to become his own man. Quietly, but firmly, from July to November 1980, he forced the retirement of all three of his father’s friends. As 1981 began Jonathan Barnes was solely in control of Barnes Construction.

Jonathan and Margaret moved to his father’s home in Shippan in 1981 at the request of his mother. Ellen Sullivan Barnes had felt alone in Apple Manor’s eighteen rooms with no family and simply her three housekeepers. Before her husband’s death, they had planned to move to a smaller home with only one housekeeper. All that had changed and she knew Jonathan had hoped one day to own Apple Manor. This would allow him to have what he wanted and give her regular access to her infant grandson, Parker. She moved to a small suite of three rooms and kept her favorite housekeeper in a two-room apartment across the hall from her.

Ellen Sullivan Barnes observed what her son had done to his father’s and her friends, but even as the majority stockholder she would not interfere, for this was her husband’s wish. Still she was disappointed in Jonathan, a nice enough husband and father and always a good son, but rather spineless when it came to doing the right thing by people in the business. His main drive seemed for profit and expanding the business, certainly key reasons to be in business, but Mrs. Barnes knew he did not have his father’s passion and empathy for his employees. Her husband had driven hard for profit and growth but also proved to be kind, with a loving devotion to his people. Jonathan seemed unable, she reasoned, to make the connection to the company’s employees despite the fact that it was the people who made the company strong and prosperous. Even still, in 1995, after fifteen years with Jonathan Barnes as chairman, Barnes Construction’s revenue had grown from 50 million dollars in 1980 to 2.5 billion dollars with profits of 300 million dollars.

Chapter 3

The summer of his twelfth year, the last summer of his father’s life, was the happiest for Curtis Strong Jr. His father had signed up to manage his baseball team after being an assistant coach for two years.

They spent endless hours together that spring with son helping father in his new leadership role. One night in March, Curtis Sr. came home with a list of players who would remain on the team from the prior year’s roster. “CJ, I need your help,” he said to his son. “The draft for the other players for the team is this Saturday afternoon.”

“Sure, Dad,” replied CJ, the nickname his mother had given him to eliminate the confusion of “Yes. Yes.” whenever she called “Curtis.”

“We need to rank all these eleven-year-olds who are coming up. With the players we’ve got coming back from last year’s team, we’ll have twelve players on a team.”

“Let me see the list, Dad,” CJ jumped in enthusiastically. “Oh boy, Kenny Smith, pick him first, Spike Johnson second, Leroy third, Alvin fourth,” the boy rattled off in rapid succession.

“Whoa, not so fast. These guys are all your friends.”

“Yeah, Dad, won’t it be great.”

“No, it won’t be, son. We want to build a winner, and I happen to be aware that Spike has a hole in his glove.”

“He doesn’t make that many errors, Dad.”

“Seventeen, count em, seventeen in fifteen games. That’s not many? That’s a whole bunch! Now let’s get serious. What do we need most?”

“Pitching?” CJ guessed.

“You got it. Besides you, and only when you’re on, we’ve got no pitchers. So our first two choices are going to be pitchers, and after that, two of the other four we draft are going to have to pitch some.”

On into the night they plotted, arguing over the merits of this shortstop or that catcher. Finally, when their rating system was finished Strong gave a “1” rating to Eddie Sanders. “Dad, wait a minute. Not him. You’ve got him mixed up with someone else; he stinks.”

“Well, CJ, I’m not too sure how good he is, but his father volunteered to coach. And I happen to know he goes to every game. So, that will give me and Uncle Willie breathing room if we have to work overtime some night. We at least know that Eddie’s father will be there to manage the team.”

“Oh, that’s great, Dad. Mr. Sanders knows even less than Eddie about baseball.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be in charge. But I’ll depend on you to help him put the right lineup together, and you’ll be his third base coach if I’m not there.”

“Really, you’ll let me do a lineup?” CJ glowed with anticipation.

“OK you two,” Louise Strong interrupted, “it’s ten thirty; let’s go, CJ, time for bed.”

“Oh, mom, we’re almost through, just a little while longer?”

“Come on, son, let’s call it a night. I’m all thunk out. We’ll work on it some more tomorrow. Head to the bathroom and brush your teeth.”

“OK, Dad.”

As Strong was leaving his son’s room, CJ asked, “Do you think we’ll win this year?”

“I know we’ll do better than last year.”

“Come on, Dad, five wins and ten losses? I know we’ll do better than that with you managing, but will we win the championship?”

“Did you think the Red Sox would win last year?”

“Sure, Dad, we always think they’re going to win.”

“I feel the same way about our team. I think if we get the players we want, we’re going to win.”

“All right!” CJ yelled in delight.

“But it’s going to take a lot of work.”

“Don’t take the fun out of everything, Dad,” CJ smiled at his father.

“Good night, son.”

- - - - -

“Dad, Dad,” Parker Barnes yelled in a state of excitement running into his father’s library. “Mr. Strong, my baseball coach, was killed yesterday,” the boy concluded, seeking some explanation from his father.

Jonathan Barnes, alarmed, asked, “What happened, Parker?”

“Right there, Dad, in the newspaper, look, “One dead, one seriously injured in accidental shooting by police at Westside pool hall.”

“I saw the story, but I did not notice the name.”

“Look, Curtis Strong Sr., see Dad, it’s Mr. Strong.”

“That’s terrible, son. Obviously Mr. Strong should not have been at a place like that,” Barnes concluded with his usual judgmental aplomb.

“What do you mean, Dad; it says it was the cop’s fault.”

“What I mean,” the elder Barnes started firmly, “is that in a place like that you can only expect trouble. Look, son, it says right here, ‘illegal drinking and drug use regularly occurred,’ and there was a fight going on when the police walked in.”

“Mr. Curtis was no dope head,” young Parker protested, noting his father’s distance, as usual. “He wouldn’t start a fight with anyone; he wouldn’t.”

“Perhaps he was just an innocent bystander, son, but that is the wrong place for a married man with children to be.”

“Child, Dad,” Parker said firmly, “he didn’t have children, only CJ,” and after a moment he continued, “Can we go to the funeral on Monday?”

“No, son, we’ll be out of place there. Now you go off and play with your friends. Don’t worry about it.”

Parker remembered Curtis Strong in his prayers that night. Mr. Strong. Coach.

He could see his smiling, cajoling face. He also prayed for CJ.

Chapter 4

The unique, sociological phenomena of multimillionaire contractor’s son and poor black laborer’s son being on the same baseball team developed from their geographic proximity to each other. The west branch of Stamford harbor was all that divided the rich on the Shippan peninsula from the poor in Waterside. As years passed CJ Strong and Parker Barnes grew to realize that more than water separated their lives. Parker was isolated by his family’s wealth, and Curtis was being swallowed by the poverty and crime around him.

In the spring of his seventeenth year, CJ Strong became a man. The event that cloaked itself in manhood occurred as CJ went to a West Main Street corner to meet his best friend, his cousin Billy Stevens. The families became even closer after Curtis Sr.’s death with Willie Stevens acting as a surrogate father to CJ and Mrs. Stevens, Louise Strong’s sister, looking out for CJ after school as CJ’s mother, Louise, worked to support the two of them.

This night was dark, and as CJ approached the corner of West Main St. and Green Avenue, he saw Billy Stevens up ahead of him. Billy pushed the person beside him into the alley next to the corner store. Curtis called out to Billy and jogged to the alley. Looking into the shadows cast from the street light he heard a desperate yell and saw a figure slump to the ground. The other figure, maybe two people, ran out the back of the alley and hopped over a five-foot fence. CJ ran in and leaned over the body on the ground. It wasn’t Billy. It was a man who appeared to be about twenty-five years old. He looked up at CJ and said, “Please help me; he stabbed me.” CJ looked at the man’s hands; they were covered in blood flowing from the puncture wound from the knife sticking out of his stomach.