OP-ED: The Wichita Lineman in all of us
I had a good friend from what many people call “flyover country” who moved to Pennsylvania from Kansas. He once told me, “I learned to drive when I was 12. It wasn’t a big deal. If you went off the road in Kansas, you hit corn. But if you go off the road in Pennsylvania, you die.”
Years later, another friend from Iowa landed at the Pittsburgh airport, rented a car, and headed east over the Chestnut Ridge. When he finally arrived, he looked exhausted. I asked if everything was all right. He smiled nervously and said, “I’ve never driven over mountains like that before. That was intense.”
I thought about both of them yesterday while I was listening to a song I hadn’t heard in years, “Wichita Lineman.” What connected them, I think, was the image at the center of that song. It was about a man alone on a telephone pole with nothing around him but flat plains and an enormous sky. My Kansas friend would have understood that picture instantly. My Iowa friend, staring up at our Appalachian Mountains, would most assuredly have welcomed it.
I loved the song when it came out in 1968, and I still love it now. But this time, nearly 60 years later, I heard something I don’t think I fully understood as a young musician.
Back then I admired the musicianship, the craftsmanship, the arrangement, the simplicity of Glen Campbell’s voice, but I didn’t quite recognize why it worked. Now I do. Jimmy Webb, the son of an Oklahoma preacher, wrote a melody that keeps going past where a pop song is supposed to end, and he never lets it. That unresolved twist is what puts the ache in the music before Campbell ever opens his mouth. I used to teach kids that the hardest thing to play isn’t the loud note, it is the subtle ones that still carry. Campbell’s whole performance is that quiet laid-back sound.
He never over-sang the lyric. He let the silence between phrases do as much work as the notes themselves. That restraint is a discipline, not an accident, and it’s the first thing that separates a good musician from a great one.
But the lyrics are what make the song timeless.
“And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.”
Need is deeper than want. Want fades. Need doesn’t. In 16 words, Webb created the line between simple love and devotion, a line most love songs never even try to find.
Then, just as quietly as it began, the song ends. No dramatic finish. The lineman is still out there. The work continues. His loneliness remains.
Maybe that’s why it has never grown old. It isn’t really about Kansas, or utility poles, or telephone wires. It’s about the people who do the unglamorous work nobody notices until something breaks, the ones out on the line, in the cold or the scorching heat keeping things running for the rest of us, while quietly hoping somebody on the other end is thinking about them too.
I’ve spent a career around institutions, hospitals, health systems, boards, and I’ve come to believe that’s where they live or die. It’s not in the mission statements. Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If the organization’s culture, its habits, values, and unwritten rules doesn’t support it, the strategy will lose every time. Often it really comes down to whether anyone remembers the person up on the pole.
The technology has changed. Telephone poles have become fiber optics. But the job hasn’t. Someone still must climb up there, alone, and do the work that keeps the lights on for people who will never know that person’s name.
That’s the lineman. And if we’re honest, most of us have been him, and we’re all hoping there’s someone at the other end of that line who cares about us, too.
Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.