Daddies at the Diner

By Steven

June 27 -- There are a couple of diners near the train station in the village where I live. Between 7 and 8:45 most mornings, there are hordes of people in line, grabbing coffee and a bagel before heading for the train to Manhattan.

Shortly thereafter, the crowd changes. The people who work around town, the housewives, the retirees and the local politicians show up. Instead of rushing in and out, they sit down and kibitz. Since I work out of a small office at home, writing and consulting for many of the same people rushing to the trains, I could often join the kibitzers, killing time until the commuters got to work.

In one corner of the diner where I go, you can see the people who run the local PTA chapters. Off to one side are the people who run the committees of one of the Catholic churches. The Democratic faction of the village council is often here (the Republicans are up the street), as are folks who volunteer for the local Cub Scout troops, the recreation department baseball teams and the library, among other things.

When I first started coming in, the crowd was mostly female. But that’s different these days. By early 2001, the economy in the New York Metro area was on its way down the tubes, and breadwinners of both sexes were at a loss for work. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 killed two people from our little village, and dozens more nearby. They also put hundreds out of work.

That disaster has been, in some respects, a boon for life in our town. After the initial period of denial and several weeks of failed job searches, the dads started looking for other things to do, and volunteering was where they found it.

Where I used to see one or two other dads outside the school, I regularly see thirty or so. Once upon a time, the custodian, the music teacher and I were the only male figures at midday PTA events, school concerts and the like. Now, they look like meetings for a car club or some other male-bonding organization.

While Tom is at the diner planning the next Cub Scout outing, Jon is working on a project for his son’s school club and I’m picking up information that will be posted on the PTA web sites for two schools.

Committee meetings that often were sparsely attended – unless train station parking fees were on the agenda – now have SRO crowds , and organizations that were withering now have robust membership lists. Remember the Year 2000 bug? Two of us – journalists with a technology background – spent December 1999 going over every computer the village owns, installing BIOS patches, updating software, fixing hardware and stamping out viruses. If it happens again, I'll have dozens of unemployed executives lined up to help.

Of course, not everybody is happy with all the new volunteers. After all, many of these volunteer organizations have been doing their thankless tasks for years without our help, and feel besieged when a bunch of out-of-work journalists and former Fortune 500 division heads start asking “why” or “why not” or “wouldn’t it make sense.” Local officials, elected or appointed, now have those same executives offering advice (whether they want it or not) and the past two council elections have been hotly contested.

But everybody is adjusting to this new reality, and it has been good for the town. Initiatives to share services with the neighboring towns -- and cut costs -- are under way, moribund organizations are being revitalized and parents can be found to assist any sort of activity.

And if we can’t figure it out, professional help on any number of things is only a phone call away. My computerized contact list has more than 4,000 names in it, people in all sorts of businesses and with all sorts of skills. The other diner dads have similar lists. Need help with the sound system at an elementary school? We can dig up an ABC sound engineer. Musical help for a school play? We have opera singers, Broadway musicians and Grammy-winning record producers. For the school yearbook, we dug up a new publishing system and printer. On the technology side, we dug up people to network the schools, computerize most of the district’s parent-teacher organizations and help get most of the various school policy manuals posted online.

Got an obscure problem and need a solution? If it will help around town, drop by the diner and we’ll try to help. If you’re not from around here, drop us a note. I’m sure we can cut some sort of deal.