Sheldon Dietz: A One-Man Pressure Group

Sheldon Dietz ranked 202nd in the Class of 1937 at Boston Latin. "There were 250 people in the class," he says, of which 40 shouldn't have graduated."

Nevertheless he went to the Harvard admission meeting in his senior year. "Dietz, what the hell are you. Doing here?" a classmate asked him. Dietz wasn't sure. But he had already applied to Rutgers, the University of. Michigan, Cornell, and Bowdoin, and he figured he might as well ask Harvard. His teachers told him no. He did it anyway.

Rutgers, the University of Michigan, Cornell, and Bowdoin turned him down. Harvard accepted him. It was his first defiance of the experts.

In the past two years, challenging the Harvard Cooperative Society's plans for an annex on Palmer Street, he has vanquished or at least equaled every expert sent into the lists to meet him. And he emerged from the fight last week with a $45,000 settlement from the Coop.

It isn't difficult to see how he won. Diets almost never let down his guard against anyone who acts like an expert. Even when he is sitting and talking with a reporter, he constantly interrupts himself by asking. "Did what I just say make sense?" If the reporter answers yes, Dietz simply asks him, "Why?"

Dietz's overbearing confidence in himself often magnetizes the people around him. One night last winter he kept the CRIMSON's newsroom in an uproar for five minutes with and imitation of a printing press. When he gets his shoes shined at the place next to the Harvard Square Theater, he keeps every one of the shoeshine boys in stitches.

His magnetism can scare the people who have to deal with him. "He's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," a bureaucrat who has confronted Dietz said last week.

Dietz's supposed irrationality is often invoked to explain why he hung on in his fight against the Coop, winking at setbacks from zoning boards and courts. But, for those who know Dietz, it isn't much of an explanation.

"You can make one of two commitments," Dietz says, "to an organization or to yourself." What made him choose himself? Possibly Harvard. He may have been a kid from the Roxbury ghetto, but he thrived. "I discovered Protestantism," he explains.

He also discovered something else--the art of starting from scratch. Scratch was his first junior varsity football game. He managed to center the ball back 39 feet and in the process, hit the fullback, Lothrop Withington Jr. '40, in the head. "Dietz has a great memory of his captain coming up to his locker," Dietz says (he often affects the third person), "and telling him he would be one of the six men who would not make the junior varsity trip to Yale."

His First Comeback

He practiced. By his varsity year, he was Coach Harlow's starting center, playing a full 60 minutes against Michigan. Dietz still remembers what a Michigan All-American said the second time Dietz tackled him: "Hey, kid, you're playing a pretty good game." Dietz spent a happy night in Stillman Infirmary.

Harlow called him "Lone Star," after Lone Star Dietz, the Indian chief of the pro football Boston Redskins. So did his classmates. And they applauded him. They even whistled at him once senior year when he stripped to his red fiannel underwear on a Dunster House stage.

Dietz still hears the applause and whistles. He heard them at his 15th reunion when he repeated the striptease in Soldiers Field. And he heard them last Monday night, when he improvised some songs for a small group of 25th reunions. "When I'm spontaneous, I'm a poet, I'm an artist," he says. "But the only people who know it are the ones who are there. I've got the largest floating audience in the world."

Dietz says of his years at Harvard, "I learned that you can be a non-conformist and still be accepted." Then he learned that you can't be at the Business School. His mother urged him to go, and he went, unecstatically.

"It made a businessman out of me," he admits. "But I like people with more personality than you can afford in business."

An Unquestioned Success

There can be no question of his success as a businessman. He now owns 20 across and three houses on Martha's Vineyard, part of a Cambridge office building, two fishing boats and the Six Footer Companies, which makes, among other things, the most popular scarf in the Square.

But the Business School also confirmed his distaste for what he calls "the comforts of repetitiousness." The U.S. Navy did the rest. After serving on a destroyer, Dietz was assigned to Admiral Nimitz's public relations staff on Guam. It was Dietz' job to greet officials visitors, such as Congressional delegations, and take them on tours of the island. When a delegation lost all its baggage, as one actually managed to do, Dietz was supposed to commiserate with the Congressman on their inability to dress for dinner with the Admiral.

Another p.r. man on Guam, William Brinkley, wrote a book about it. The book was called "Don't Go Near the Water," and Dietz, in case you're wondering, was Ensign Max Siegel.

The war left Dietz, once again, with nothing more than scratch. "I still haven't landed or alighted in a job, and am neither married not with children," he wrote in his class report for 1947. But, after a few lean months in a subterranean brownstone apartment in New York, all that changed. Dietz worked in a ladies' hosiery plant, then with a tie manufacturing company, and finally dreamed up the Six-Footer Company. And he met his wife, Annabelle.

Dietz's contempt for the experts grew with his prosperity. When he wanted electricity for the home he built on Martha's Vineyard, his lawyers told him he couldn't get it. He went all the way to the Massachusetts Public Untilities Commission and got it. When he moved to Cambridge, his lawyers told him he wouldn't be able to obtain title to the house he wanted. He went to the courts and got it.

But the experts made their big mistake when they tangled with Dietz's private dream -- Palmer Street, the little street between Harvard and Brattle Squares.

Dietz and two partners bought an old warehouse at the corner of Palmer and Church Streets in 1962. They renovated it and rented it to such tenantz as architects Sert, Jackson & Associates.

As he worked on the building. Dietz somehow imagined Palmer Street without the trailer trucks that roar down it and block it by pulling up on the sidewalks to unload. The street had a "village character," he claimed. If he had had the money, Dietz says now, he might have tried to develop the street himself.

But it was the Coop that had the money. Early in 1964, it announced plans for a $1.3 million textbook annex on the West Side of the street. Dietz promptly sent declarations of war to every Coop director -- copies of God's Own Junkyard, and book of photographs of urban and rural blight.

The Coop's plans were all wrong, Dietz argued before the Cambridge City Council, the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeals, Governor Endicott Peabody '42 (an old football friend), and a Massachusetts Superior Court. There was no reason, he said, to accept the assurances of Coop directors--some of them Harvard officials -- that their plans were the best possible. "Intelligence in one particular field," he wrote at the time, "is not generally transferable."

In fact, he became more and more convinced that Coop directors were shirking their responsibility to the community. "Don't write about me, write about the Coop directors," he pleaded with a reporter at one point. Then, he grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled: "The Coop directors are violating all the teachings of the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Law School, the Harvard School of Public Administration, and in particular, the Harvard Divinity School."

One Quixotic Attempt

He even made one quixotic attempt to rouse the community. A few weeks before the Coop's annual meeting in 1964, Dietz announced that he would nominate nine Harvard and M.I.T. professors to oppose the official nominees for the Board of Directors. None of the professors had been told in advance about the honor. At the meeting, be haranged a crowd of applauding students for five minutes and closed with what he said was a poem:

Hold fast old noble Dietz

WE have heard your cries and rush to your zid

1000 strong to fight

The Establishment

He needed a quorum of 1691 Coop members to challenge the Establishment's slate. Only 135 showed up.

That was the pattern for Dietz's entire effort: the more spectacular his methods, the less spectacular his results. He collected hundreds of signatures for a petition to save an old carpenter shop on the annex site. The Coop bulldozed it. He pleaded with Cambridge City councilors to outlaw a bridge the Coop wanted to build across Palmer Street. The Coop has built it.

But, at the same time, the Coop was admitting quietly that Dietz was partly right. It changed its plans to show the annex set back from the street, as Dietz had suggested. An off-street truck loading dock that Dietz had also wound up in the Coop plans.

Quietly Paid Off?

And, beginning last November, the Coop quietly negotiated with Dietz a peace part of which he, to put it middle, will be the benefactor. The Coop pledged, by the end of this summer, be install terns along Palmer Street and repave it with take cobblestones and redbrick of a $40,000 job. And it will hand over to Dietz $5,000, almost half of his court costs. Dietz's prices is a promise that he will never again challenge the Coop before any administrative or judicial body.

The pact came just in time. With the Coop fight. Dietz had reached an apogee of protest. Simultaneously he joined the fight to save the Memorial Drive sycamores from the MDC and the fight to save North Harvard Street from the BRA. He even, for the purpose of writing a letter to the Herald Tribune, formed the Society for the Preservation of the United States for Human Beings.

But the protesting had began to sour. Earlier this year, Dietz said that the Coop should be kicked out of its nearly completed annex because it didn't have a temporary off-street loading dock for trucks. Then the Coop countered with photos of trucks unloading on a wooden platform next to the building. Then Dietz charged that the photos were staged and that the platform was normally blocked by construction machinery. Then the Coop displayed affidavits from truck drivers who said that they had used the dock. Then Dietz produced an affidavit from someone in his office who said that he had never seen trucks at the dock. Finally, on another related matter, both sides deadlocked. Then the negotiating began.

A Deceptive Peace?

By signing on the dotted line, Diets and Coop officials have ended their monotonous war of affidavits. And, with the Coop controversy over, Dietz is, in a sense, back to scratch again. What will he do now?

He is very much aware of the role he has been filling. In an old Time article he Clipped out, he has underlined this: "For the most part it is probably a healthy thing to be well behaved,' added Psychologist Barron. But there are times when it is mark of greater health to be unruly.' "Next to it he has written "Dietz."

"I'd like to see fountains in Brattle Square," he says. "I'm waiting for an entrepreneur." He may very well be kidding in fact, there are only two things certain about Dietz's future. One is that when he reads this article he will say it is bush. The other is that he will be secretly pleased.