NWSCDC

By Howard Snyder

When I heard that Mary Ann McNulty had died last week, it made me think about all of the community organizer  characters I know who have died over the past few years. ACE Backus, Ted Seaver, Tom Jackson (TJ), Nick Topping, Terry Brulc, Alex De Leon, Mary Ann.  Many others.

And then there was Rich Oulahan.

Ahh. Rich Oulahan.

Known variously as Ricardo, Richard, Rich, or as his friends knew him, Richie.

I was a friend, but one that was in and out of his life. We met when I worked at Esperanza Unida from 1976-1978. The precise dates are a little hazy. Organizing in those days didn't work like a job. You didn't get hired. You just kind of gravitated toward whatever interested you at the time. I gravitated toward Esperanza Unida.

We didn't exactly hang out the two years I worked there. He had been thrown out of Marquette University a year or two before and was representing injured Hispanic workers in unemployment and worker compensation hearings. Companies usually fought UCC claims and always worker comp claims. The system was evil. Rich fought evil. He would have made a great lawyer if he could have kept himself in school. He was one of the toughest SOBs I ever met.

In the meanwhile, we took care of injured worker families and organized! EU and friends took control of the Inner City Development Project board and fought the Social Development Commission for money they routinely got from the federal government for anti-poverty programs. Politically, the South Side was one wild place.

We worked around the clock, and like dogs, but it was really uplifting and fun.

But Rich was not part of that fun. He was already on the road to becoming an icon, and I was more of a little brother while he was doing the really important work of the organization.

Most of my time was spent with Ted Uribe, EU's Director. If there ever was a rapscallion who walked among us in Milwaukee, it was Ted. He was brilliant, cruel, outrageously funny, and a fire-breathing public speaker.  No one could understand a word he said, in English or Spanish, but we went wherever he went.

Terry Brulc, aka Dr. Warmgrease, who grew up on the near South Side, was one of us. He began the Southside Auto Repair Center. I thought the name should have been CARS. But the totally mad Terry had no use for logical acronyms. He would bring a dozen or so really dirty kids to ICDP meetings and start taking automobile engines apart on the floor while the meetings were going on.  It was total entertainment. He called what they did, socialist auto repair. 'Each according to his means.'  Unless, of course, you happened to drive GM. He hated GM because they started advertizing using Mr. Goodwrench. Terry thought they had ripped him off; after all, most of his friends called him Warmgrease.

After I left EU, I went to work for Silver Spring Neighborhood Center and later started the Northwest Side Community Alliance and the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation. Meanwhile, Rich took EU in new directions creating the model for social enterprise in Milwaukee. That is, non profits creating their own businesses. EU's automobile donation program and resale was pretty genius! Certainly the first of its kind here. Maybe anywhere! Who hasn't donated a clunker to Esperanza Unida? Now every public radio station in America does it.

Northwest Side CDC started to become pretty nationally famous itself, for a different kind of economic development model utilizing business organizing as a community development tool. A friend of mine noticed that Rich and I were starting groups in Milwaukee that were being noticed and had national impact. He said we were "twin brothers from different mothers". Different mothers, maybe. Same father, though. Ted Uribe. And I think it was no accident.

We played basketball on Sunday mornings at the neighborhood center's gym I would open up. He was never afraid to throw an elbow. I never retaliated.

We competed during the week, too. Maybe I was jealous of his notoriety. He was feared. His model, and he, took on all comers. People were afraid of him because they felt threatened. I always thought it was funny, what he did, and people just didn't get the joke. At the CDC,we organized, and I tried to reason with people that our strategy was worth supporting. No one was afraid of me.

As the years went by, we drifted apart and then back together. We talked mostly about our kids when we got together. Three of my kids are from Nicaragua, and I know his son Kane lived in Nicaragua for a school semester and Richie went down there to visit him, so we had a lot in common. We were both proud that our children were following in the "family business".

Then he had his aneurysm, was hospitalized and lived in a nursing facility until he died four years later in 2008 at the age of 59. The lion was gone.

When Richie got sick and everything started to go to hell at EU, I started having dreams about him. Not often. But often enough. I am no shrink or dream interpreter but I think I am still competing with him on some level.  I think our model of economic development is far better with more long term impact. But he is an icon. I am still the little brother, somehow.

Sometimes I think he's talking to me, like important people do in a dreamer's past.

Enough Richie! You win.