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Tody vs. Tomorrow By Joseph Curtis Editors Note: This is an excerpt from address given at University of Illinois Charles K. Brightbill Annual Banquet on March 31 at Champaign, Illinois by Joseph E. Curtis, Commissioner of the Boston Park & Recreation Department. The parks, recreation and leisure services field that awaits graduates is one of extremely limited public funds and resources. The affluent period of the early 60s when new funds, programs, resources and spending ideas were being hatched every week is long past. The Vietnam War tightened the budget picture sharply through the late 60s and, with the advent of President Nixon's second term, the Federal money value has been all but shut tight. Any appreciable loosening of the financial picture, federally or statewise, during the next 5 years is not likely. Automobiles, clothing, medical supplies and foodstuffs, home appliances and musical instruments— all are ringing the cash registers like triphammers and pushed the 1972 Gross National Product past the $1.110 trillion mark. Not to be outdone, economist Peter Passell and law professor Leonard Ross, both of Columbia University, say, "Don't knock the $2 trillion economy—it's on the way! All this in a nation still spending tens of billions in Vietnam, while struggling with the enormous cost of drug abuse and welfare administration, a 9% unemployment rate, an international trade deficit, and a continuing space exploration program. Talk about fiscal muscles, Uncle Sam has them to spare! America's leisure industries are among business's pacemakers. When Americans bowl a billion dollars a year; when Angelenos register more pleasure boats than private automobiles; when Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith estimate the leisure market at from $150 to $250 billion annually, we know something is cooking. This vast complex of leisure America includes fine foods, fine cars, trips abroad, backyard swimming pools, city parks, golf courses, Little League, second homes and, sometimes, second wives! The Kerner Civil Disorder Commission report of 1968 cites "Recreation Inadequacies" as one of the top five grievances scored by aroused ghetto residents in all parts of the country. To the poor, the American dream includes leisure services. Recent surveys by economists and business management experts place the recreation and leisure industry among the six highest potential investment and growth areas of our economy. COMMERCIAL RECREATION The commercial leisure services industry is rapidly sophisticating and burgeoning. The boating and fishing gear industry grosses more than a $ billion annually, while camping, resort development, overseas travel, antique collecting, golf and spectator sports are each computed in multiples of billions. The new Disney World, recreation land sales, the sports and racing car passion, and recreational aviation are driving the leisure gross up sharply. The impact and influence of public park and recreation operations and development upon this growth of the past two decades has to be substantial. Ironically, however, public recreation expenditures annually amount of some $2 1/2 billion, in the face of a business dynamism that has driven the Gross National Product to the $1.103 trillion mark, and gross leisure expenditures to the $250 billion mark. The parks, recreation and leisure services field is one that demands "Synectic Perspection", or the ability to perceive relationships constantly, among diverse beings, organisms, concepts in the world around us. Synectic Perspection is the capacity of many of our people to see these relationships quickly, to expedite their link-ups mentally and to produce a new concept or idea which is workable, viable in very short order. An illustration of this principle of relationships is a concept used in Boston called "Converge." Converge proposed that the recreation complex in Boston be seen essentially as a unit, and not in the classic image of public recreation and parks, surrounded by an ineffective group of private agency satellites. It visualized the directing into this complex the available money (some $20 million annually), people, facilities, support by YMCA's YWCA's Girls' Clubs, public parks and recreation, Boys' Clubs, Scout operations. Settlement Houses, and a host of similar organizations already on hand. Instead of suggesting the cliche of "Cooperative efforts", Converge strongly urged a clear identification of: 1. The severe fiscal set-backs that all agencies were suffering, 2. The increasing needs of a changing public and a changing city, 3. The enormous potential represented by the existing resources of the agencies involved, viewed collectively, and focused. The world of parks, recreation and leisure services with the American family is in serious trouble. A timely illustration was the recent television chronicle on the Loud family from California. In a series of 12 episodes, it dragged us Illinois Parks and Recreation 10 July/August, 1973
The tragic comedy of the two New York Yankee pitchers (Peterson and Kekich), who announced recently their plan to trade wives and parcel out the children involved, left the reader with a feeling of not not knowing whether to laugh, to cry, or to seek a psychoanalyst. The American family is in trouble; When over 40% of our marriages end in divorce or separation, when a great many young people are justifiably confused and uncertain what the modern role of marriage is, and when people of all ages treat marriage with the same candor that they attach to the printed warranty on a toaster, then it becomes painfully clear that something is seriously lacking. The challenge to the leisure services movement to provide new, stimulating, wholesome settings for families of husband and wife, or families of husband and wife and 10 children, to join together frequently, vigorously, culturally, happily, is a challenge never equalled in our past. PREDICTIONS I see a new coalescing of various priorities and fields of endeavor. Tomorrow's recreation and park executive will need to develop the flexibility to adjust to the times, to fill niches, to make extensions and contractions as concerns demand, and to seek a variety of forms and shapes to accomplish her task. The leisure industry, large today, will grow enormously. Travel expension, the movement of vast numbers of people between far points on the earth, the steadily shortening work week combined with the great challenge of boredom on the assembly line, the advent of the all-volunteer highly professional armed forces of the United States, the continuing sophistication of campus life—all of these will continue to feed a vast and growing leisure industry. Today it represents 1/4 of our Gross National Product. I would predict that leisure will represent more than 1/3 of our Gross National Product within 10 years! Sheraton Hotel chains, Holiday Inns, Howard Johnsons, Hilton Hotels, Disneyland, Seaquarium, Five Flags Over Texas, and other vast commercial and family-oriented recreation services and complexes will draw heavily upon your experience. Not only will park and recreation graduates work for these organizations as apprentices to build their tourist and hotel aspects, but also they will enter new fields of training and leadership within the commercial sphere. In some settings, commercial recreation agencies will absorb, operate and provide the type of services that have traditionally been provided by the undernourished public recreation and park agencies. These will include conventional playgrounds, parks, stadiums, pools, beaches and ice skating rinks. There will be an enlarged awareness by recreation professionals of the deep significance of:—Nutrition, Behavioral psychology, Marketing, Communication, Finance, Physiology. These disciplines, overlapping ours, will bring great new talents and a wave of leadership from fields in which people have not prepared themselves solely as recreation and park administrators. We are only beginning to scratch the enormous potential of the women in our profession. Barriers are fallings, but these are only the obvious barriers. The particular talents of women have yet to be fully assesssed in the professional market. In women we do not simply have the converse of men. When women are given fully the opportunities they seek, that is to be co-workers with men on an equal basis, they will not simply match men, nor will they strive solely to outdo us, but will show special intelligence, charms and skills and courage for the recreation field. There will be a massive growth of international recreation and leisure liaison, and a much larger movement of students and professionals between universities, municipalities, private recreation and commercial recreation agencies from around the world, one country to another. This is done today on a small scale, but it will expand rapidly. The opening of vast markets in China, Russia and, later, India, with the inevitable change in their standards of living, will provide a massive demand for the sophisticated services of park and recreation planners, designers, manufacturers, leaders and administrators for decades to come. CONCLUSION Three years from today, our nation will celebrate its 200th Birthday Party. Our recreation and park class of 1976 has almost completed its freshman year. Planning, designing, training, recruiting of personnel—a vast stirring is underway to create the greatest single recreation event of the century, the Bicentennial. You are part of that tomorrow, be certain that the park and recreation majors have a major voice in this event of the century. Illinois Parks and Recreation 11 July/August, 1973 |
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