Post Script

This may be hard for some to read on the day after our stunning national vote, but election results sometimes have a funny way of being right.

Now that the 2016 political season is history, I can say this: it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that I wasn’t elected Mayor of Attleboro in 1983. (See “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory”)

Looking back, I like to think that I would have been a good Mayor, but I can also see that I was young in a lot of ways, inexperienced and probably a bit too full of myself. I certainly had more than my share of critics, who would have liked nothing more than to see me fail and been eager to help me do so.

I hope I would have been a quick learner. In the days before the election, I had been talking to people with much more experience about joining my City Hall staff. I hope I would have listened to them.

In 1985, I was re-elected to the City Council having been selected to fill a vacancy several months earlier.  But now Mayor Reed, my opponent in 1983, lost her re-election bid to former Councilor Kai Shang, who had finished a distant fourth in the preliminary two years before.

Like our President-elect, no one in the political crowd took Shang’s candidacy seriously.

His claim to fame was two-fold. Shang shot the winning basket in the 1948 “Tech Tourney” giving Attleboro its first statewide hoop championship.

He was also involved in a long running feud with the City over the fate of his business/home.  Shang operated his family’s long established downtown laundry on property mapped out to be taken as part of the City’s redevelopment efforts. He and his family lived on the upper floors.  So, in addition to those who remembered his high school exploits, he also had the sympathy of many newer residents, who saw him as a small business owner being treated unfairly by the City.

Shang’s less than effective and often confusing public speaking style only added to his everyman image, which in many ways he was. But, it also served to mask the fact that he was a very successful businessman, who owned many pieces of valuable property across the City.

He was in marked contrast to Reed’s “high society ways.” As the only female Mayor in Massachusetts at the time, she was often involved in activities outside the City and even served as co-chair of John Kerry’s Senate Campaign. When word got around that she was being taken by helicopter to events, many in working class Attleboro were not impressed.

(Reed also inexplicably decided to go back to school after taking office and began attending nearby Wheaton College.)

When her term ended, Reed stepped away from politics. In in the height of irony, Shang began working at the new City Hall, built by Reed, and located directly across the street from where his family’s business and home had stood for decades. He was, in fact, a surprisingly effective Mayor for six years concerning himself with issues that impacted the average citizen.

Like Shang, there’s no predicting what will happen when Trump takes office.  But, the country survived the Presidencies of Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover. (Though it took a world war for us to get out of the mess Hoover created.)

Here’s hoping that President Trump frequently surprises those of us who didn’t support him and at least occasionally disappoints those who did.