Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [14]
The house afforded her a sanctuary, a place where she could come and go as she pleased, a place to be alone. She pinched herself. She hadn’t experienced that kind of freedom since before she had had her first child at age sixteen.
On a notepad, she scribbled some thoughts: “I don’t think my life could be better and I know I have never been happier in my life than I am now, sitting on the porch rocker watching the water go by.”
August 29, 1997
Claire considered George Milne a vital player to have on board if the NLDC was going to make a sudden impact. She had to get him to commit, so her pitch had to impress him. But heading into her meeting with Milne, Claire had more on her mind than simply getting him to join the NLDC’s board of directors. She’d been doing some thinking. Milne’s Groton office was directly across the river from the vacant mill site in New London. It was no secret that Pfizer had outgrown its Groton facility and had been hunting for a large tract of real estate to build more clinical office space. Never one to miss an opportunity, Claire planned to make the most of her one-on-one audience with the man ultimately in charge of site selection for Pfizer’s new home. She figured that luring Pfizer to a contaminated brownfield was a pipe dream, but she had to ask.
Milne welcomed her warmly and listened politely as she explained in more detail the plan to revive the NLDC as an agency committed to helping reverse New London’s economic misfortunes. She rattled off the names and credentials of those who had already pledged to join the agency’s board. But, Claire explained, the one thing she didn’t have in the NLDC’s ranks was the CEO of a major corporation.
Milne needed more information to understand why a local development agency needed a major corporate executive on its board. Claire told him about the New London Mills property, describing it as a splendid piece of acreage sitting dormant right along the river.
“You may even want to think about it for Pfizer,” she said.
It was a soft pitch, designed to see if Milne would swing. He didn’t. Pfizer’s site-selection team had been reviewing potential sites for a year.
“Well, it wouldn’t work for us,” he said, dismissing the idea at once. “We’re down to two sites.”
“Well, okay, even if it wouldn’t work for you,” she said, “you would still be an important person to the board because you would know the kinds of things that a Fortune 500 company would look for in a building space.”
Joining another board wasn’t something Milne really had time for. His plate at Pfizer was pretty full: decision day was looming for selecting a development site for the new research-and-development facility, and the company was ramping up to put a full-court press on the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to fast-track Viagra through the approval process. With Pfizer projecting hundreds of millions in revenue from the impotence drug, a lot was riding on the FDA application.
But Claire pressed, stressing the virtues of the NLDC and the fact that she and Steve Percy were already committed to doing what it would take to market the mill property. “It’s a great piece of land, and it needs to be developed,” she explained. “But the people in the city don’t actually know how to do that. We are people who can make this happen.”
Milne found it hard to say no. “What’s the commitment?” he asked.
“I’m going to tell everybody at the first meeting that we’re going to stay together one year,” Claire said. “If we can’t get something dramatic going in twelve months, we’ll abandon.”
As a personal favor to Claire, Milne pledged six months. That’s a long enough period, he suggested, to determine whether he had anything worthwhile to contribute.
Claire accepted that.
6
POWER STEERING
September 10, 1997
Become an RN without classes. The advertisement on the hospital bulletin board caught Susette’s eye. She folded