Public service workers know what it`s like to be maligned. Over the years, when some of them are shown to be loafing on the job or, in the worst cases, abusing the public trust, the bad publicity seems to taint all of them. Little wonder that 19 years ago, when the National Civil Service League approached Richard J. Daley about organizing a public service awards program, the late mayor responded quickly and heartily. He assigned the project to the city`s Department of Personnel, then headed by Charles Pounian, and the Superior Public Service Awards program was born. The Ford Foundation provided $2,000 ”seed money.”
The intent was to honor dedicated public service employees, to promote community appreciation of quality public service and to inspire able young people to choose public service careers.
”We jumped at it,” recalls Pounian, who now works for a private consulting firm. ”Hundreds of outstanding, well-motivated, productive workers go unrecognized, while some work crew that`s not working as it should gets all the attention, (complete) with a picture of three guys standing around and looking down a hole in the street.
”The federal government had had an award program since World War II, but it was only for those in management and above. Ours includes a good mix of people.”
The program began in 1969 and covered all employees except agency heads of the Chicago Board of Education, Chicago Housing Authority, Chicago Park District, Chicago Transit Authority, City Colleges of Chicago, City of Chicago, Cook County, Metropolitan Sanitary District and the State of Illinois. Nominations were made by supervisors in five categories:
supervisory, public safety, clerical, professional and general service (an executive category was added a few years later). The nominees had to be
”employees who showed career progression as well as length of service, a record of competence or sustained efficiency and a record of integrity and devotion to the principles of public service.”
A committee of business people then reviewed the nominations and selected two winners in each category. The first winners were honored at a luncheon on June 19, 1969, attended by their families and other guests. Patrick O`Malley, chairman of Canteen Co., spoke at that first awards luncheon.
The winners each received not a run-of-the-mill certificate but a plaque designed by Chicago sculptor Milton Horn. Cast in Italy, the small work of art is a bronze relief sculpture mounted on a marble stand and base.
Depicted on the plaque is a man (symbolizing superior public service)
struggling to save a woman (symbolizing the city) from the crushing coils of a serpent (symbolizing the community`s diverse problems).
”We wanted (an award) that was a class act,” says Pounian. ”We wanted to show the worth of the program by giving something significant. Having an outside, neutral group making the final decisions (on the winners) was important, too. It eliminated the pressure to `pick my guy.` ”
The State of Illinois pulled out of the Superior Public Service Awards program during the administration of Gov. Dan Walker, but otherwise it has continued largely unchanged through the mayoral administrations of Michael Bilandic, Jane Byrne and Harold Washington. And though 16 other cities started giving similar awards at about the same time, Chicago is the only one that has continued its program.
The 1987 awards will be presented Thursday at a dinner in the grand ballroom at Navy Pier. This year`s 12 winners were chosen from a pool of approximately 120,000 public service workers.
As a way of saluting all public servants of outstanding commitment and integrity, SUNDAY talked with some winners from the past three years. In general, they seem to be a modest lot, each expressing some variation of their common reaction to the honor conferred on them: that they were simply doing as good a job as they could and that they weren`t the only ones who deserved the award.
ROXANE GIOIA
CHICAGO FIRE DEPARTMENT
PUBLIC SAFETY, 1986
As a Chicago Fire Department emergency medical field officer, Roxane Gioia no longer has the one-on-one contact with the city`s ill and injured that she had as a paramedic on an ambulance. But she tries to pass on her philosophy to the men and women she now supervises: ”They should treat the people as they would want their family members treated. You know, God forbid that an ambulance crew should ever pick up my sister and not treat her accordingly.”
Gioia knows full well how the many ”garbage calls”–calls to pick up drunks or from people who want a ride to a doctor`s office or just want to complain that they`ve had a cold for two weeks–can take a toll on the attitudes of paramedics. ”Then when the real emergency comes, you think, `Why are you calling us?` ” she says. ”It`s a very tough job, and we have to maintain a caring, people-oriented attitude.”
After working six years as a dental assistant, Gioia wanted to learn the basics of emergency first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation in case someone in the dental office or in her family suffered a heart attack. ”You come upon accidents, and people are always saying, `Somebody do something.`
Well, I didn`t want to stand there saying, `Somebody do something.` I wanted to be able to do something.”
So she attended emergency medical technician (EMT) school and signed on as a fire department EMT in 1976. She then took the lengthier and more demanding paramedic training course and became a paramedic in 1978.
The next year she was promoted to paramedic in charge of an ambulance, and in 1981 she became a field officer in charge of a number of ambulances. That position, similar to what she now holds on the West Side, meant responsibility for staffing and equipping the ambulances, assigning priorities for medical treatment and dispatching the ambulances to the proper hospitals. In 1985 Gioia was promoted to assistant chief paramedic, in charge of ambulances covering half of the city, but for personal reasons she asked a year later to return to a field-officer`s job. She and her firefighter husband (they had met on the job) also became the parents of a son in 1986.
Born in Sheridan, Wyo., Gioia, 36, came to Chicago with her mother and sister when she was 2. After graduating from St. Benedict`s High School, she considered a secretarial career but decided against it and instead answered an ad for a dental assistant`s job. The dentist taught her the basics of chairside assisting and management, but she also took a course in dental assisting and myofunctional therapy, a kind of speech therapy.
She cites her mother as a crucial in-
spiration in her character formation. ”My mother worked a day job and a night job to support my sister and myself. When I do something as far as work is concerned, I do it to the best of my ability. And my mother is always helping other people. She owns a restaurant now, and when people come in off the street, she feeds them (for nothing). I`m sure I got my desire to help people from her.”
Once at Christmastime, after supervising the paramedics that aided a family with five children stricken by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove, Gioia bought each of the children a gift. She also brought them dinner from her mother`s restaurant. ”It made me feel good to do it,” she says.
”That`s what helping each other out is all about.
”Right now what I in my job can do for the public is to make sure that my people are aware of their responsibilities to the public and to impress upon them that these people (they care for) could be their brother, father, mother or sister.”
But whether they be police officers, firefighters or judges, public servants are ”only human,” she says. ”In this (recent) incident of a firefighter being charged with murder, one of the newscasters said, `You would never expect that from a firefighter, would you?` Well, you would not expect that from any human being. People tend to think public servants are beyond crime or corruption.
”We all make mistakes, and certainly some mistakes are worse than others, but we all try to do the best we can, and most of us would want a little more understanding, a little more compassion instead of: `Off with their heads.` ”
ALICE ESAKI
CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
CLERICAL, 1985
In 1974, when the oldest of her three daughters entered Senn High School, Alice Esaki went to work as a clerk there. In that position, another kind of person might have continued to do nothing beyond typing and filing, but Esaki has expanded her job over the years. She does her clerical work with dispatch so that she can indulge her first love–helping students, many of whom are Asian refugees struggling with the English language and the American way of life.
”I see myself more as a community person than a clerk working in a school,” says Esaki, a longtime resident of the Uptown-Edgewater neighborhood who has been president, treasurer and chairwoman of many committees of the PTA at Pierce Elementary School. ”I`m very much in touch with the various community organizations.”
Her list of job responsibilities is prodigious. Esaki serves as an all-purpose aide and liaison between the school, students, parents and social-service agencies. She says her most fulfilling role is coordinating a vocational education program for students with limited command of English and of a state-funded peer tutoring program for those same students.
”We keep strict data sheets that show 68 percent of the (tutored) kids got better grades,” she says. ”It`s the most rewarding program to me because I can see the students improve and the tutors become more mature. For tutors, I try to get not straight-A students but B or C kids with a personality that can relate to other kids and help them along. This same program now is being used outside of Senn in various churches.”
Esaki, 63, whose parents came to America from Japan, has a special empathy for Asian students that came out of her own experiences as an English- speaking student in a high school in Japan. It was the custom then for Japanese-Americans to send their eldest children to school in their homeland. Esaki found herself caught between two cultures and struggling with her studies.
”I knew a little bit of Japanese, but it didn`t do a bit of good,” she recalls. ”The first year I couldn`t even pass the test to get into high school, so that year I had to have a tutor. In fact, for the four years I was there, I had to have a tutor in order to graduate.”
Clearly influenced by the Japanese work ethic, Esaki has tried to impart it by example to her own children. ”They`ve seen me active with the PTA, and I was involved in an Asian-American mental-health research center when it was formed and I was able to travel all over the country for meetings. The kids were young, and my husband (an engineer) didn`t object. I love to talk to people and find out new things.”
Esaki characterizes as ”myth” the popular conception of all Asian kids as extraordinary students on a track to Harvard and other prestigious schools. ”The first wave of (new Asian) immigrants here were the Vietnamese,” she says. ”They were educated and had the (financial) means to come, so their motivation was different. Those are the ones who make it to Harvard or Berkeley. The newer people came because they had to; they didn`t bribe their way out. A lot of them are not literate in their own language, let alone English.”
Esaki notes that many parents among the newer immigrants are less involved in their children`s schooling. ”I understand that everybody has to work,” she says, ”but many (of these) parents don`t even know that their kids are cutting classes. An aide calls the home, and they say, `Oh, but he goes to school every day.` ”
Realizing how tough it is to be an immigrant, Esaki arranged for a Vietnamese psychiatrist to visit Senn weekly to talk with students both in groups and individually. ”This program has been going on for three years, and it has been very helpful,” she says. ”The teachers have started recommending students for counseling who are troubled, depressed or separated from their families.
”I hear so many people say, `I hate my job,` ” she says. ”For me, it`s not the pay that matters; I hardly get anything. But I love working here with the kids. Only when they become bothersome to me will it be time for me to quit.”
FREDERICK M. FELDMAN
METROPOLITAN SANITARY DISTRICT SUPERVISORY, 1986
After graduating from De Paul University Law School and spending six months as a ”professional trainee” at Chicago Title and Trust. Co., Frederick M. Feldman got ”an unsolicited mailing” from the Metropolitan Sanitary District advertising ”the lowest entry-level attorney position.” He took an examination, placed high and in February of 1969 got the job that launched his public service career.
Now one of five assistant attorneys in supervisory positions at the Metropolitan Sanitary District, Feldman, 45, oversees legal work for the district`s real estate holdings, including leasing, purchasing and selling.
Law, however, wasn`t Feldman`s first career choice, even though his father was a lawyer. He had planned to become an engineer, but upon discovering that he didn`t have a strong enough mathematics background, he transferred from the engineering program he had begun at Cleveland`s Case Institute of Technology to a liberal arts course of studies at Chicago`s North Park College.
”As soon as I made that switch, I found my niche,” he says. ”(At North Park) I majored in political science with an eye toward going into law. Law may have been my first choice all along, but I thought that I`d go for something a little more glamorous like electronics engineering. It was big in the early `60s.
”My father was a lawyer, and as a child I would go to court with him, and while I was in college, I clerked for him in the summer. I liked
the practice of law. I saw it as an academic discipline as well as a vocational experience.”
His hard-working father was Feldman`s earliest inspiration as a child growing up in Chicago and Skokie. At the sanitary district, he found another strong role model in Stanley Whitebloom, a onetime chief of environmental enforcement. ”He was a gung-ho public servant who ate, slept and worked sanitary district,” Feldman remembers. ”In fact, he was stricken with the heart attack that ultimately killed him when, on his way home from his
(wedding) anniversary dinner, he stopped off to inspect a monitoring operation going on with some of his people at McCormick Place.”
For Feldman, the term ”public service” means just that. ”You`re paid by the public,” he says. ”You`re responsible to the public. You`re charged as a trustee to manage the assets that are basically owned by the public. I try to take that charge fairly seriously.”
It bothers Feldman when other workers don`t try to do their best. When the Arlington Heights home he shares with his wife and two daughters was being built, Feldman and his father stopped construction at one point because some of the tradesmen were not doing what they had agreed to do.
Allen Lavin, chief attorney for the district, calls
Feldman ”a completely reliable, consistent worker” who is usually first choice whenever a ”must” job needs to be done.
Feldman finds his greatest professional satisfaction in seeing a deal through to completion, a process that may take up to three years, and in the fundamental fairness in the law. In his office is a ceramic cowboy that his wife made for him. ”I like (the artist) Frederic Remington, but I can`t afford a Remington bronze,” he says.
”It typifies Western justice: When the law doesn`t work, you can always go to a six-gun and a shot. I never would. I`m a strong believer in the law. The law is here to protect society. The days of the six-shooter and the shotgun are gone, except in the wildest imagination of dreamers.
”The law is our way of resolving differences. Ultimately, if you have an adversarial situation, you go to court, and the judge will tell you who`s right and who`s wrong, and you have to abide by his decision.”
But what if the judge is corrupt?
”The bad guys get all the attention, but there are thousands of judges and lawyers out there who do strive to do a good job, who don`t take bribes and don`t deviate from what is the accept-
ed practice. I still have faith in the system.”
DEIDRA J. JACKSON
CITY COLLEGES OF CHICAGO
SUPERVISORY, 1985
Anyone who knows Deidra J. Jackson realizes how willing she is to work early in the morning, late at night or during weekends if she must. For Jackson, associate vice chancellor for academic support services at the City Colleges of Chicago, that kind of commitment is the essence of being a professional in the public sector.
”I don`t know that I`ve ever had a job where I did not have to work beyond 9 to 5,” says Jackson, who is responsible for all counseling and tutoring programs for the college system. ”This system couldn`t survive if we had those kinds of administrators. It`s the nature of the animal.
”I look forward to the day when those of us who are in the public sector are looked upon with a lot more respect than we are and our talents are as valued as those of people who are in the private sector. With them, of course, there`s a product and a bottom line. Where do you put the value on the kind of work we do?”
Jackson, 38, has been in her current job for about a year. Before that she spent nine years at Malcolm X College, where she rose to dean of continuing education. When she was interviewed for the vice chancellorship, a member of the interviewing team remarked that she sounded ”like a missionary.” Jackson had never thought of herself in that way, but she acknowledges that the desire to help people has been the motivating force throughout her career.
After growing up in East Orange, N.J., Jackson moved to Chicago to attend Lake Forest College. She transferred to George Williams College in Downers Grove to be near her high school sweetheart, whom she soon married.
But money problems forced Jackson to drop out of school. Their son, Douglas, was born when she was 22. By the time the couple were divorced, Jackson was working full time with the Model Cities poverty program and working for a bachelor`s degree in public administration and a master`s in education administration policy analysis.
In her five years with the Model Cities program Jackson worked her way up from a clerical job to several other positions. Then she became coordinator of a federal grant at Malcolm X, where she again rose in the ranks.
All the while, she was rearing her son alone. ”It helped instill a lot of independence in my son,” she says. ”He learned to do his laundry and to cook. It also helped in imbuing him with my values. I don`t think parents spend enough time giving their values to their children. A lot of children are valueless. My son is bent on going to law school and starting his own business, but he also knows he has a responsibility to the community.”
On Jackson`s desk is a metal button with the words ”I`ve Got a New Attitude,” a souvenir of sorts from her days at Malcolm X. During a period of low morale, when faculty, administration and staff members weren`t communicating, Jackson was charged with remedying the situation. She organized a day of workshops for all employees around the theme ”I`ve Got a New Attitude,” from a Patti LaBelle song popular at the time.
”It was great,” she remembers. ”We had faculty members and janitors talking to each other about the problems of the institution, and clerical workers and administrators talking to each other, too.
”That`s the kind of thing I like to do, to cause people to talk to each other and solve problems.”
Jackson is active with Renaissance Women, a group of black professionals seeking to influence social legislation and otherwise enhance life in the black community. She is about to begin work on a Ph.D. program in public policy analysis, something she ”needs to do.” She also wants to write a novel.
Whatever else the future holds for her, one thing seems certain: Jackson won`t be tempted by the private sector. ”I don`t know that I`d be good at making money,” she says wryly. ”I might give away the store.”
