My first day on the job as human services reporter didn't get off to an auspicious start.
I was sitting in a Division of Family Services meeting where I had just been introduced as the newspaper's new "specialist."As usual, the staffers who conducted the meeting were talking "alphabet soup, stringing letters to-gether instead of calling programs by their full name.
Frustrated, I turned to the man next to me and asked what AFDC was.
With a look of absolute horror at my ignorance (some specialist, huh?), he kindly explained that AFDC is Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or welfare. It is the simplest, most commonly used acronym in the whole department lexicon. Doubtless, small children in other countries know what it means. I had no idea.
That was my introduction to Norm Angus, who is stepping down as director of the Department of Human Services after holding the post for almost a decade. Before that, he was deputy director. Angus is one of the few people who served both Democrat and Republican governors as a department head.
In the past five years, I've run into him often. And through a hundred agreements and disagreements, I have admired his calm leadership of one of the state's largest departments. There have been times when I believed he had the worst job available in the state because Human Services deals almost exclusively with people in crisis: poverty, disability, youth corrections, child abuse, mental-health problems, divorce and custody and child-support enforcement and aging.
Recently, I asked him what accomplishment in Human Services made him proudest.
Without hesitation, he said he was proud of the collaboration with Health and Education to provide programs for schoolchildren who are considered "at risk." There will never be enough money to do everything they'd like, Angus said, but the effort has been effective and it is growing.
He named other highlights: His department has been very active in social-service reforms. It piloted the Emergency Work Program, which allows singles and couples who do not qualify for AFDC (which is for single-parent households with a few exceptions) to work for an assistance grant. The department has been a national leader in self-sufficiency demonstration projects and welfare reform in general.
Angus said that improving relationships and cooperation between different departments has been one of his priorities. It's amazing, he said, how much can be accomplished when people give up "turfism."
A couple of years ago (about the time I was becoming comfortable with the alphabet soup), he got the Legislature to approve a department reorganization that redefined jobs and responsibilities and, of course, changed the names and acronyms. (Oh boy, new soup!) Some of it was cosmetic, like calling Social Services Human Services or calling the Division of Services to the Handicapped the Division of Services to People with Disabilities. Those changes, he said, better reflected the division's jobs and philosophies. Other changes were more substantial: realignments of services and staff to better serve the public.
During that recent interview, he told me there have been times when my stories made him angry. I didn't know, because he never called to tell me how to do my job. He recognized that our roles are often adversarial and he respected professional boundaries.
The thing I respect the most is the fact that he never tried to "freeze" reporters out because he disagreed with what we wrote or didn't like it when his department was criticized. If he felt something needed corrected, he asked for it, I did it and we just went on.
That may not sound like a big deal. But I have encountered people who wouldn't talk to me because they'd once had a bad experience with some other reporter, which I could do nothing about. Angus forgave me for the things I was responsible for.
He has never told me "no comment." If he couldn't talk about an issue, like a governor's policy on something, he'd tell me he couldn't say anything and why he couldn't say anything. He has, on occasion, said the words I seldom hear from bureaucrats: "We goofed on that one."
Reporters and department heads maintain a distance because their jobs are so different and often place them on opposite sides of an issue. If they were too close, there would be conflicts of interest.
Now Angus is stepping down. So I can say something I would never say under other circumstances.
I'm going to miss him.