To beard or not to beard

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald in July 2006.

I recently grew a beard for two weeks while I was away from the office. It came in with more gray than I’d expected, but it looked pretty good, if I say so myself.

A few people around town saw the beard, and I even brought the beard with me to work one day for show and tell before I shaved it off.

The experience got me thinking about beards and their status in the workplace, especially in office environments. Though beards have become more acceptable in the business world (think Steve Wozniak and Larry Ellison), we’re not all dot.com whiz kids.

So, is it okay for a typical executive or CEO in the East Bay to have a beard?

“I started with a full beard around 1981,” said Neal Snedecor, who works for the City of Livermore and meets regularly with business owners in his economic development role. “My friends convinced me to drop the full beard and go with a goatee in the early ‘90s as a trendy thing.”

Snedecor said his facial hair has never been an issue at work.

Another beard-toting executive is Ken Mercer, former mayor of Pleasanton and now a Vice President with ValleyCare Health System.

“I've had my beard for about 30 years,” said Mercer, “and no one at work has ever said a word about it.” Mercer said he initially grew the beard because he wanted to try it, and then liked it.

“I shaved it off once and grew it back the next day,” he said. “I trim it every day as I don't want it to get shaggy.”

While Mercer had his beard during his 16 years on the city council, including 11 years as mayor, most men in politics play it safe and shave. This is especially true of modern United States presidents who, with the advent of television, have been clean-shaven.

After all, some people associate beards with counterculture, seeing facial hair as sending an anti-establishment message. Where would beatniks and hippies have been without their goatees and flowing beards?

Desmond Morris, the British zoologist who studies human behavior and is best known for his book “The Naked Ape," believes that men began the practice of shaving because it made them look younger, friendlier and cleaner.

On the other hand, beards in western civilization are also associated with wisdom. The ancient Greeks, most depictions of Jesus, leaders like Lincoln and scores of university professors have helped promote the notion that beards signal knowledge and stature.

But then again there’s the beard as tough guy, the unfettered Clint Eastwood-type who drifts around saving innocent villages from outlaws, but seems a bit of an outlaw himself.

And what about the beard as director, actor and writer? Picture Steven Spielberg, Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway.

And does the actor-on-vacation stubble count as a beard? If Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck walking unshaven through airports can draw paparazzi and adoring fans, shouldn’t this fashion trend translate even a little into the corporate world?

With so many beard messages, what’s an executive to do?

“A CEO is a public figure who must recognize a broader responsibility,” said Jim Halliday, former CEO of HumanWare who lives in Danville and currently sports a closely-cropped beard. “He or she must personify the image that presents that institution in its best light.”

Halliday said he opted to be clean-shaven when he was the company’s CEO, but is comfortable with a beard in his new role as president emeritus where he sits on a number of industry boards and tours the country speaking on Braille literacy and vision impairment.

“My beard reflects the earthier side of my personality,” he said, “the side that makes me feel comfortable on a stage or in a vineyard.”

So, to beard or not to beard?

Perhaps it comes down to personal preference after assessing the culture and expectations within your company.

“I enjoy the salt-and-pepper effect,” Snedecor said about his neatly trimmed goatee. “It’s kind of the Sean Connery look, so I’ll keep it for now to save time in the mornings, to avoid nicks and cuts, and maybe, just maybe, to add a sense of intrigue to my demeanor.”

A fragile braid of wildflowers

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald in the summer of 2006.

Last week on vacation in the Sierra Nevada, I taught my 10-year-old daughter how to fly-fish. She’s that wonderful age when every cast is hopeful, when everything about life is possible.

After casting into an alpine lake one morning, I told my daughter I learned about fly-fishing just after I graduated from high school.

“I learned up here in the Sierra,” I told her. “The man who taught me was a doctor, a family friend.”

The man was Robert Moncrieff, now a retired pediatrician who lives in Monte Sereno. I'll never forget his patience and kindness.

Moncrieff’s son, Scott, also helped me learn to fly-fish when our two families hired guides and pack horses to take us into the high country of Yosemite for a week in the summer of 1975.

We enjoyed the trip so much that Scott and I backpacked by ourselves the following summer to the same wilderness canyon and set up camp near a stream called Return Creek. We spent a week fishing and relaxing, and forging a good friendship.

Then, in 1977, I joined Scott and his parents and sisters for yet another trip to Return Creek. This time his New England cousins, aunt, and uncle (who was a surgeon) came along with us into the wilderness.

Some 20 years later I wrote a poem based on our experiences in the high country, titled “Photographs.” My idea was to create photographs in words, like snapshots in a vacation scrapbook. In the final part of the poem, I capture moments from the 1977 trip.

Before I share the last stanza of the poem, I want to recount an experience that demonstrates both the value of writing about our lives and the power of newspapers.

At the time I wrote my poem in 1998, Scott was living in Maine. Though our parents stayed in touch, he and I hadn’t spoken for many years. I thought he’d appreciate seeing the poem, so I got his address from my mother and wrote to him, enclosing the poem and several others, as well as a few of my short stories.

He didn’t write back.

I wondered if the letter was lost, or if Scott didn’t feel as I did about our summers backpacking. Then I thought perhaps he’d intended to write, but just never got around to it.

Then, in April 2000, I got a letter.

“Why I have waited so long to thank you for your poems and short stories, I am not sure,” he wrote. “I am ordinarily a good correspondent, except that I could not explain all that I felt.”

Scott told me my poems had been sitting on the shelf in his living room since he received them, and that he read them often.

What finally prompted him to write is that while he was on a train to the west coast from Maine, a man in the seat ahead of him was reading the San Francisco Chronicle with the pages wide open. Printed in the newspaper was an interview with me and lines of verse Scott immediately recognized as my poem about Return Creek.

Scott wrote, “Of all the people who might read those lines, none would understand them in the special sense I would, since beneath the beautiful sketch is a time gone by.” He goes on, “I still cannot give words to all I feel, but certainly there is the inimitable joy that only the pine and granite, snow, water, and ‘bright azure silence’ of the Sierra can give; there are a thousand taut memories, a center from which I can never be moved, and a wistfulness that moves in and out of simple longing and sadness.”

Scott’s words captured exactly my feelings about our trips into the high country. The “center” he references is both the connection we had to the wilderness, and that magical time in youth when everything is possible, when in spite of our awareness of the fragility and dangers of life, we’re hopeful and content, knowing we have our whole lives ahead of us.

It’s the same center from which my daughter cast every line as we fished last week in the Sierra, the same snapshot in time I hoped to capture in the final lines of my poem:

Here I watched your cousin
weave a fragile braid of wildflowers.
Your uncle stitched
the bleeding brow of his wife.
We fished Return Creek
casting hopeful lines
clear and strong as sutures
pulling trout from
vigorous waters
flowing from Sierra snows
to distant rivers, unseen.