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Volume 5, Number 2 - Spring 2007
Board Treasurer is Also
Artist & Author
talking with Russell Marks
Russell Marks’ circuitous path to People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos took him through Spanish classes at Princeton, Army service in Puerto Rico, business in Latin America, and the Americas Society in New York.
And then, it brought him to the Bo Robinson Education and Training Center in Trenton, where a group of men in a prison-release program dug into the words of Marks’ own story, “The Haircut.”
He’d long admired the program’s theory. Now he had a chance to see it in practice. “I got to see how effective the technique is,” says Marks, 74, treasurer of the People & Stories board.
The story—one in a “pile” of short fiction Marks has written, along with two unpublished novels—concerns a boy who resists his mother’s urging to get a haircut. It turns out that he’s been terrified to face the barber ever since an incident at school; the barber’s son was beating up the narrator’s little brother, and the narrator responded by giving the bully a bloody nose.
“Finally, he goes to the barber shop, and there’s a threatening description of him getting into the chair. But when he confesses his misdeed to the barber, the man laughs and says, ‘He probably deserved it!’
“Lots of things the men said about the story surprised me,” Marks recalls. “In one sense, this kid was proud for having beaten up the school bully, but at the same time, he was remorseful. They related it to themselves—how you can stand up for someone and, at the same time, know you’re doing something wrong. It was a useful tool for them to examine their own lives.”
Marks had retired from the business sector—he’d been president of Phelps Dodge International, the largest private copper company in the world—and was serving as president of the Americas Society in New York, working to build bridges between Latin American and North American culture and commerce, when he joined the People & Stories board.
He brought not only his business acumen, but the experience of living in Latin America, a lifelong love of Spanish and a passion for literature. Living in La Paz, Bolivia, and later in Peru, during the 1960s was “fascinating,” Marks said. “We were there during the golden era. I managed paper and sugar companies—sugar haciendas with 30,000 employees. It was an agricultural operation that paid industrial wages.” Still, he found the dissension among Latin American countries disheartening and left with a sense of frustration about the continent’s progress.
Even before visiting Bo Robinson, Marks valued the People & Stories model; the program, he says, “allows people to use literature as a doorway to expanding their own appreciation for life.”
Four years into retirement, Marks actively cultivates his own appreciation for life. He makes art—multi-media works of acrylic paint, wood, copper and textiles—every day. He serves on two other non-profit boards. He reads a book a week, listing them diligently and alternating two non-fiction titles with one novel.
“It’s a question of rationing time,” he says. “When I retired at 70, I was ready to become an artist. Now I’m 74, with a lot more years to go.”