(Note to readers: why does a remembrance of a landscape architect, Bill Talley, appear in this blog about spirituality? Answer: Because he was a spiritual person, naturally!)
I have been fortunate enough to have had three wonderful mentors in my life – Paul Korshin, Bob Hanna and Bill Talley. In earlier years I wrote remembrances of the first two and now, sadly, I am called upon to write a remembrance of Bill. But Bill was the real mentor I always unconsciously but deliberately imagined and sought; it’s just that I expected to encounter him or one like him so much earlier in my career!
Where can I begin? Shall I begin by saying that although he was eighteen years my senior, he was in many ways my best friend? Shall I begin by saying that Bill had a great gift of friendship – that he made friends easily and cultivated each one individually? That when you were in his presence one to one, you felt that you were his very best friend and confidant? That many, many of his friends felt the same way, yet without any envy or jealousy toward one another? That when Bill was talking to another friend and you approached the twosome, he always paused to welcome you into the conversation? There was never, never that awkwardness that so often happens when you approach two huddled people; that waiting to be noticed and brought into their sphere. Nor did Bill ever forget to introduce me to his comrades, and me to them. I believe that Bill valued friendship (and doubtless family) above all other values in a world where only a few blessed people place friendship on such a high pedestal.
I never felt awkward or embarrassed around Bill, even when he criticized me, and his criticisms were always right-on. He had a brilliant way of guiding people, rather than judging them. He would unobtrusively create a comradely intimate space around an issue he perceived in your personality or behavior or way of dressing, so that you sort of entered a little conspiracy with him to solve the problem or offending behavior. Only later, on reflection, would you realize that he had been criticizing you in his way. I know, because being nearly broke in 1994 when I first came to work with Bill, I wore an old pair of ill-fitting polyester pants on more than one occasion.
Of course my friendship with Bill grew over the seventeen years I knew him, from summer 1994, when I first interviewed to work in his landscape architecture firm, until March 22, 2011, when he suddenly died of complications from lung cancer. Still, I can’t say that there was a moment before we were friends. We instantly fell “in like,” the first minute I spoke to him over beers at what was then the Leschi Lake Café, next to his office. This, before I learned that wine was his drink of choice: he instantly agreed to share beers with me and his then-partner, Scott Pascoe. Our friendship never wavered or fizzled, from that moment onwards.
Bill was a great mentor. He taught me nearly everything I know about planting design and quite a lot I know about landscape architecture generally, but more importantly, he taught me nearly everything I know about how best to interact with clients. How to be always positive and put the best foot forward, even in awkward moments. Bill was a genius at deferring and resolving conflicts, always with a great reserve of good humor.
Bill was an iron fist in a velvet glove. For the first few months that I worked for him, I only saw the velvet glove; the great, plentiful and playful sense of humor. Again, it was a conspiracy on Bill’s part: a conspiracy to share with others any opportunity for fun and for joy; and the opportunities were plentiful and unending. Then, one day in the summer or fall of 1995, I saw the iron fist come out of the glove, when Bill went head-to-head with a stubborn and recalcitrant, low-bid contractor on a landscape renovation project we were doing forUniversityofWashington’s south campus. Bill got up in the guy’s face and yelled at him, which he deserved. Bill’s friend and colleague, Jon Hooper, head of the UW’s facility services, was growling and menacing with his fists from the sidelines. It was a clear case of bad cop, bad cop! Bill’s iron fist was like a sword sheathed: it only came out the velvet scabbard when it absolutely had to.
Bill was the best judge of character I have ever met. His first impressions of people almost never failed him. He could tell within the first five minutes of meeting someone whether they were good, bad, “trouble” (as in his friendly greeting, “Here’s trouble!”) or a royal pain in the ass. His predictions about people, whether they would turn out to be helpful, useless, or merely neurotic or grandiose, were unerring. If someone hammered away about one subject all the time, angrily or merely doggedly, Bill would throw up his hands and refer to them as “relentless.”
His ability to know when to show up at a social event and when to leave was likewise unerring. Coupled to his judge of character, it lit the clearest path ahead like a laser beam. This was made clear to me when once I accompanied him and his wife Judy to a fancy birthday party thrown by and for one of our clients. After the catered dinner in a downtown ballroom, the client rose to a lecturn and began to speak. Bill immediately tapped at his watch and stage-whispered, “time to go.” Judy and I both objected, saying, “let’s hear what she has to say.” Bill relented against his better judgment, but an ‘I told you so’ moment soon followed, as the party quickly morphed into a fundraiser for a cause we were not 100% committed to supporting. Pay we did, however, because we stayed. It was not that Bill was stingy, only that he objected to the sense of being manipulated. Nor did he actually say, “I told you so.” That would have been too judgmental. Instead, he took Judy and me into his conspiratorial intimate space and merely said, “I knew she was going to do that, bless her heart.”
Everyone Bill met was “my new friend John Doe.” This applied equally to actual new friends, cashiers, annoying bureaucrats and enemies alike. Always any person was “my new friend” until he metamorphosed into such a rude or thoughtless adversary that the velvet glove would have to come off. Even then, Bill would say something like, “I will have to have a come-to-Jesus moment with my new friend John Doe.”
What I most loved about Bill was his great ability to talk intelligently and informally about any subject at any time, fluently slipping back and forth between topics, and never lecturing. We could be talking about one of our projects or a professional point about landscape architecture; slip into discussing our families or personal lives, then move on to chatting about cooking or the books we were reading; our philosophical viewpoints; places we loved visiting or wanted to travel to, and places to avoid (Bill had a dread of third-world countries with dirty open-palmed entreating orphans); and then back again to landscape architecture, all within the space of a few minutes. I loved this conversational fluency of Bill’s all the more because that was exactly how I had always liked best to converse, yet in my working life at least, most of my bosses wanted to stick safely to one topic only: landscape architecture and its most closely related feeder subjects. Plus, hold that thought, because another thing I liked so much about Bill was that he was never my boss. Oh yes, I worked for him in the beginning and he paid me, but he was always a colleague first and a supervisor a distant second. This was not true of anyone else I had ever worked for, including my second mentor, Bob Hanna.
Bill made it fairly clear from the start that if I didn’t mess up badly (this “if” being more in my own mind than in his verbal presentation of the issue,) we could become partners, and he generously forgave me several early-on big bloopers that I endlessly attacked myself over. There was the time I designed a series of wood gates too heavy, so that they nearly fell off their hinges; the time I inadvertently caused the incident that resulted in the afore-mentioned bad cop/bad cop contractor face-off, and the time I left a roll of presentation drawings on a Kenmore sea-plane atFridayHarborprior to a meeting. Bill’s response to all three incidents was “don’t worry;” in fact, he said “don’t worry” about nearly every problem our firm faced, from poor cash-flow to disgruntled clients. He never again even mentioned the embarrassing incidents.
Once you were in with Bill, you were in. He seemed unusually willing to experiment with professional partnerships, to take risks with people he had observed and approved of, to a degree beyond anyone else I had ever worked with. The string of Bill Talley partnerships, some more successful than others, stretched from 1960 all the way up until 2004, when he retired from our own firm. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve the honor of becoming his partner, only that Bill made the path to partnership so easy and direct: four or five easy steps instead of eight or ten hurdles to jump.
Stay tuned for Part 2
Bird of Spirit 