Dick, W98GIG,

First, I saw a number of your constituents from throughout the Central Division at Shepherdsville, KY and Findlay, OH this weekend. From brief discussions and comments, they all seem to be very pleased with your leadership – as well they should be, I’m sure.

I’m forwarding Allen’s reply to my note about getting something useful out of served agencies. I’m sure he won’t mind my sharing this with the Board. I am pleased he, too, feels we ought to evaluate the issue. I do have a couple of fuzzy ideas and have contacts that I am sure would be happy to help formulate further, more definitive thoughts, but I’d like first to hear any relevant thinking Allen has developed from his TDY in the Gulf (of Mexico, this is) region.

I also thought the comment from the news clipping service was more than amusing. I believe it testifies not only to the job Allen has been heading directly with the media, but also the fact that he is driving home the critical concept to our club PIOs that we need to get our hands dirty in the PUBLIC relations trenches to be successful. Prior to Allen, my take-away has been that we were pretty good at telling our story to ourselves, but were generally poorly successful at getting it told to the public. Thanks to Allen’s leadership as well as to the cooperation and support of others at HQ and in the professional media, I believe much progress has been made toward educating PIOs. Much remains to be done, as Allen suggests.

Finally, rest assured that anything that begin to evolve from Allen’s and my (and others) discussions will be worked fully through appropriate channels. My objective is to stimulate the initiation of progress and then to allow this progress to develop and mature as it goes through any established normal channels.

Jim

Jim Weaver, K8JE

Director, Great Lakes Division ARRL; http://www.arrl.org/

5065 Bethany Rd., Mason, OH 45040

Tel.: 513-459-0142; E-mail: k8je@arrl.org

ARRL: The reason Amateur Radio Is!

MEMBERS: The reason ARRL Is!

-----Original Message-----
From: Pitts, Allen W1AGP [mailto:w1agp@arrl.org]
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2005 1:00 PM
To: Weaver, Jim K8JE (DIR, GL)
Subject: RE: LACK OF SUPPORT TO US BY OUR SERVED AGENCIES

Thank you!

When the dust starts to settle out, and that may be a while yet, I agree with you that this should be looked at. We are learning many, many important lessons from this here at HQ. But there also is a wonderful shift that has happened - the "big fish/small pond" mentality is being openly derided and shown to be the impediment that it is. That goes for agencies as well as local potentates.

Meanwhile, we keep plugging as best we can - together!

OH...BTW - I got what has to be the very BEST COMPLAINT that I have received in a long, long time. BurrellsLuce, the clipping service I set up to replace Bacon's, called to complain that there were "TOO MANY PRESS CLIPPINGS for this month" !!!!

They wanted to know what to do about it as it was screwing up their systems. I said to just put them all in a big box and send them to me anyway. :-)

Allen

From: Jim K8JE [mailto:K8JE@arrl.org]
Sent: Monday, September 12, 2005 11:51 AM
To: Pitts, Allen W1AGP; arrl-odv
Subject: LACK OF SUPPORT TO US BY OUR SERVED AGENCIES

Allen,

First: Congratulations on the tremendous press you gained for Amateur Radio. When I view the great results you obtained relative to my limited knowledge of how you went about doing your job (so well), I can only conclude you are the best Public Information guru the League has had – ever! I also congratulate Dave and others who were responsible for bringing you on board.

It may be a premature to work through the following; therefore, at your convenience and pending your personal recovery from Katrina, I’d like to speak with you about how we (the Amateur Radio Service) can get much greater PR assistance as a result of critical work we provide through “served agencies.” It may be partly out of ignorance that I sense that we (the ARS) continue very deliberately to receive the royal shaft from the ANC and others who are too mentally-small and childish to be able to share that which should legitimately be shared.

This, of course, rankles me --- not merely because the ARS typically receives negligible or no billing. Having worked very closely for many years with two such served agencies, I attribute this to their callous, selfish and myopic failure to recognize that their continued reluctance to point out the great good we do will ultimately lead to a dearth of skilled operators needed to carry out the very communication that allows them to perform their work.

I am unwilling to sit back and accept a priori that we have no viable options to pursue in rectifying this problem. I am equally willing to accept that a mutually—acceptable, mutually-beneficial solution to this problem can be found.

I will appreciate it if you let me know of a couple of times during which I could telephone you to discuss this subject. Obviously, your perspective is very important to understanding the situation.