This issue of Used Car News celebrates women in our industry which is typically hide-bound by men. Anyone who knows me knows that I think women are better at most things than men. Women contribute to the well-being of companies all over the globe in so many ways. The recognition and acceleration of this diversity over the last couple of decades have been rewarding, in themselves.
I help run a small auction in the Southeast and women are in every position of the organization, from drivers to the company controller. They help bring personality to an otherwise fairly dry business. They tend to be better at project-oriented, goal-specific work.
I’d better be careful here before I become subject to some reverse-discrimination points.
That, these days, the willingness and desire to say these things openly is refreshing. We no longer have to hide behind our hands or have these things said privately with all the old-fashioned fears of retribution.
You know the expression that all the best ideas do not come from the corner office. I think a diverse organization grows and fosters in its own created light when allowed to do so. Let people have the belief that they can make a contribution and they will find a way to do it and, even better, prove it.
My experiences give me a close look at the auction industry and the names that could populate a contributors list to the industry’s well-being are myriad.
Ruth Hart-Stephens, NAAA’s president in 1994, brought so much class to our organization and the tenor of a room went sky-high just when she walked in. It didn’t matter if it was a meeting room for a few or a convention gala dinner. She was Ritz and glitz without being brash or overstated. She was fabulous.
The year following, Alexis Anne Jacobs took the gavel from Ruth and here too was class at every step. It was earned the hard way, by growing her auction in the face of some of the toughest competition around and she knows the business inside out, upside down. She still graces any meeting with a dignity that is rare enough.
Berta Phelps, who worked for my competition, Manheim – to their betterment – for too many years for me to be polite was a beacon of common sense. We didn’t always get on at first – our opinions were sometimes at odds because of our backgrounds or paymasters but over the years an abiding respect for industry knowledge grew to a love that still maintains, although she’s retired. Luckily, the industry still has access to this paragon.
Many of our customers have helped us improve ourselves and aspire to be better than we once were; Linda Silverstein from Ford Motor Co., Merci Ruiz with Wells Fargo and others who form a Pantheon of guiding lights have been a pleasure to work with knowing that you were better off by spending time with them than not.
There is hardly an independent auction that doesn’t have a woman equally at the helm, like Henry and Patty Stanley.
They abound out there – girls and women who put the stamp of virtue on part of the business that still benefits from their ideas and expertise. Charlotte Pyle is taking up the cudgel for the NAAA President this year. I wish her well as she makes her mark.

I'm madder than a wet hen, probably along with 90 percent of the population that shares absolute disgust at the performance of our government in recent weeks. Each party is as guilty as the other, posturing and preening till the very last minute of the debt ceiling debate, or should I say, debacle. Just to add insult - and I am insulted - to injury, the American public has just been sold a cheap bill of goods with as many smoke and mirrors as the national debt could afford.
I, for one, don't believe for a minute that two trillion dollars being pared out of entitlement expenditures or savings in other areas over the next 10 years is even going to cover the increase in health care costs over the same period.
I'm not trying to suggest that the issues are not complex, they are enormously so. But our politicians use those complexities to dodge the truth, hide behind and pontificate on areas in which they have little or no expertise while trying to make themselves look like celebrities in the process.
Politicians are not celebrities. They are paid, overly so, to do a good job just like you and me and if they don't they should be summarily dismissed. It's a pity that they are allowed to wait for the next election. 2012 will provide the public with a fabulous opportunity to throw them out on the streets. We even have some of them trying to act the part of celebrities by sending lewd "sext messages" of themselves to others and then thinking that they should not be castigated nor cast out as a result. Who do these people think they are? They are public servants - no more, no less. What would happen to your business if you left for vacation without making arrangements for the workers to continue and be paid in your absence? That's what they just did with the FAA. It amounts to unconscionable irresponsibility.
I don't want to see tax increases or "revenue enhancements" as Pres. Obama calls them, but increases in all sorts of non-governmental living costs, like interest rates, will surely go up in their place anyway, so we're darned if we do and darned if we don't. The international community, let alone our own stock market, which has already taken the measure of recent events by having the various indices plummet over the last 10 days, will treat us as a laughing stock.
For all the money that's been squandered on programs invented by this administration, hardly one new job has been created. We have to re-employ the unemployed before we can start to count new and fresh jobs - more political smoke from this Washington bonfire of the vanities!
As for the billion-dollars-a-day two wars that we continue, fostering the growth of the military industrial complex for no good reason that I or many like me can see, we should just give them a date for our departure and tell them, "you're on your own from here on out". If anyone threatens our shores we'll then be able to afford to wreak whatever defense or retribution we see fit for the circumstances and if others don't like it, then "tough, get over it".
Political correctness has its place to some extent, but the Western world has become afraid of its own shadow and now won't say "Boo!" to a goose.
It's a changing world, I know, but we have to insist that our elected representatives reflect the will of the majority or we should give them a good kick in the backside and I can calm down a bit.