Marty Bell Author Archives

Welcome to our annual Green issue, one of our favorite issues each year. Why?

One of the joys of editing this magazine—in addition to the chance to intermingle with and learn from all of you—is the opportunity to tackle topics that make a substantial difference in American lives.

As the adult child of the elderly, how can you be most comfortable that your parents’ needs are being addressed?

Not all situations for aging are equal. There are better ways.

In the time it takes to read this sentence you will age. Sorry to have to report that. But it’s true.

The English royals seem to have succession down pat. It’s based on birthright, everyone knows who’s in line and the citizenry seems to respect it. And despite occasional disruption from wars and marriages, it seems to have worked pretty well for hundreds of years.

With some difficult puzzles, you sit sorting through the pieces seemingly forever. Can it be that there is nothing here that fits? And then, eventually, you find a fit. It was right there in front of you all the time.

At a stage where criticizing government as being dysfunctional and posting opinions have become our national pastimes, it is palliative to take a comprehensive look at the New Markets Tax Credits program as an antidote to cynicism and self-celebration.

Our staff writer Mark Olshaker and I spent the summer of 1981, the most glorious summer of each of our lives, traveling the country with a film crew and visiting the stars of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers for a documentary based on Roger Kahn’s bestselling book, The Boys of Summer. While Duke Snider was the color commentator at the time for the Montreal Expos, we found most of his former teammates in their 50s or 60s and working in their old hometowns: Pee Wee Reese worked in marketing for Louisville Slugger; Clem Labine managed a clothes manufacturing operation in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Carl Erskine was a bank vice president in Anderson, Indiana; Roy Campanella, long disabled from a famous car accident, was a consultant for the Dodgers; Preacher Roe ran a family grocery store in Viola, Arkansas; and Carl Furillo, battling cancer at the time, worked as a night watchman at a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania.

In “Hamilton,” the most highly praised Broadway musical in some years, author/composer/lyricist/star Lin Manuel Miranda tells the story of America’s Founding Fathers to rap music—and it works. Miranda’s brilliant conceit is that the rebels who sought a better life than they had under King George III share the emotions in the voices of those seeking a better life today. And, in his cast, the faces of his 18th century revolutionaries are those of today’s America.

Success and its resultant growth may make the ownership and staff of a company happier, but it does not make their jobs easier. Success in the housing industry, affordable or other, usually means more—more buildings, more units, more residents, more staff, more income, more expenses, more data, more time, more everything.

In prominent historian Joseph J. Ellis’s latest work, The Quartet, he chronicles how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay persuaded—and with great difficulty—states in fear of another King George III that wanted to remain independent, instead, be united. What that Colonial Quartet feared was 13 different opinions on vital issues (at that point, primarily war with a foreign nation).

It may be called Newport, but it’s a town that joyously celebrates the old. On a visit there in July, I toured the oldest library and synagogue in America and had dinner in the oldest tavern, the White Horse.