ROBERT HOLLAND; LABOR LAWYER, `ULTIMATE PROFESSIONAL' - The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)

Robert E. Holland was one of those rare labor lawyer negotiatorswho made even his adversaries leave the table smiling.

'Bob took a personal interest in each case and knew how to bringpeople together by respecting them and treating them professionally,'said Representative Michael E. Capuano, former mayor of Somerville,where Mr. Holland had been the city's labor lawyer. 'He made it soeveryone walked away feeling they had won as much as the other side.'

Mr. Holland, 57, a founding partner in the Boston law firm ofDeutsch Williams Brooks DeRensis & Holland who negotiated more than350 contracts for public-sector clients in a 30-year career, diedMonday at his Boston home of melanoma.

'While aggressively advocating for his clients, Mr. Holland neverforgot the importance of forging strong relationships betweenmanagement and unions representing public employees,' said ElizabethValerio, a partner in his firm. 'He worked to improve theserelationships and to build trust between the parties helping tocreate stable labor relations and to avert work actions in difficultfiscal times.'

Mr. Holland's wife, Vivien Li, executive director of the BostonHarbor Association, said that while he had scaled back his workconsiderably since his illness was diagnosed in February, hecontinued to correspond with colleagues on legal issues by e-mail.

'Bob really loved the law,' Li said. 'He felt it was the way oneperson could make a difference.'

Mr. Holland, who was appointed the city of Boston's youngest laborrelations director in 1974 by Mayor Kevin H. White, represented thecity as its lead outside counsel in its recent contract negotiationswith Boston's firefighters union.

Among the condolences received by his family at his death was afruit basket from the union with a card that read: 'Bob, it was neverpersonal. It was always business.'

Yesterday, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who engaged Mr. Holland ascounsel throughout his administration, described him as 'the ultimateprofessional. Bob knew labor law, its technicalities, and how tonegotiate,' Menino said. 'Besides being a lawyer, he was a person whocared, who wanted to be involved, and who wanted to make adifference. He always had a smile on his face and was always agentleman.'

Over the years, Mr. Holland negotiated contracts for the Bostonpublic schools, the Boston Water & Sewer Commission, the BostonPublic Health Commission, the Massachusetts Water ResourcesAuthority, the Economic Development and Industrial Corp., theMassachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the Massachusetts PortAuthority, and many cities and towns in the Commonwealth.

'Bob became one of the best labor lawyers in town,' formergovernor Michael S. Dukakis, who knew Mr. Holland in his early years,said yesterday. 'He was one of those guys who brought out the best inpeople. You couldn't be down in his presence.

'Here was this wonderful Irish kid from West Roxbury, bright as awhip, with great people skills, committed to public service. He was awonderful example of the people who make up this town. They come fromlarge families, often with parents working as civil servants, whobecome committed to public service themselves. They represent thebest of the old and the best of the new,' Dukakis said.

Mr. Holland was born in Boston, one of eight children of WilliamE. Holland Sr., who worked for the Boston Housing Authority, andMargaret (Murray). His brother, William 'Bo' Holland of West Roxbury,said his kid brother was a character and took part in plays at St.Peter's Elementary School in Dorchester, a theatrical talent he latersometimes 'used in negotiations.'

Mr. Holland's parents moved to West Roxbury when he was 10 and hegraduated from Boston Latin School, where he played football, in1964. He graduated from Boston College with a major in finance in1968, and was drafted into the Army, serving two years in Georgia.

Growing up in West Roxbury, Mr. Holland served on the DemocraticWard Committee, was a founding member of the Parkway Boys and GirlsClub, coached youth football to a league championship, and coachedthe Holy Name CYO basketball team to the Suffolk County championship.He continued to do pro bono legal work for the Boston Latin SchoolAlumni Association throughout his career.

In 1973, Mr. Holland graduated from Suffolk University School ofLaw and began his labor law career as assistant director of laborrelations for the city of Boston. The next year, White promoted himto director.

Herbert Gleason, the city's corporation counsel at the time,recalled yesterday that Mr. Holland first arrived as the office boywhile in law school. 'He was really one of the young stars of theWhite administration. He was very fair and patient, tough, butthoroughly good-natured. He loved to laugh, especially at pomposityand pretense. He had a wonderful laugh,' Gleason said.

Mr. Holland left city government in 1977 to go into privatepractice with his childhood friend, the late Kirk O'Donnell. In 1982,he met Li on a Boston Harbor farewell cruise for a ConservationCommission colleague. Mr. Holland became a founding partner ofDeutsch Williams in 1986. In 1999, the Labor Guild of the Archdioceseof Boston awarded him its prestigious Cushing-Gavin Award for hiscontributions to labor/management relations.

For relaxation, Mr. Holland doted on his teenage daughters,clothes-shopping with them and encouraging his daughter Caroline inher writing and photography. He worked out every day, read, andfollowed the Red Sox.

A lifelong fan, he failed to convert daughter Andrea. At FenwayPark, he wore a Red Sox cap; she, a Yankee cap.

'Bob never forgot the song they wrote about Carl Yastrzemski afterthe 1967 Impossible Dream team,' his brother William said. 'He wassinging it last Saturday night on his sick bed.' Mr. Holland believedhis team 'would go all the way' this year, his wife said.

Besides his wife, brother, and two daughters, he leaves threeother brothers, James P. of Quincy; Edward J. of Hyde Park, andJoseph M. of Weymouth; three sisters, Patricia Tonra of Dedham; MaryM. of Hull and Kathryn A. of West Roxbury.

Meeting failure on the ultimate road to success.(Sport) - Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales)

Byline: By Carolyn Hitt

When not writing about seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Keats penned a sound-bite that could have come straight out of a sports psychology manual. 'Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience,' mused the poet. 'Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success.'

But political correctness decrees otherwise. 'Failure' should be banned from the classroom and replaced with 'deferred success' declared the retired primary school teacher who put the mohair jumper into woolly liberalism this week.

Alastair Campbell must wish he'd added that phrase to his Bumper Book of Spin. The Lions weren't hammered by the All Blacks they just underwent a sustained period of deferred success. But you can't ban the F-word from sport - and we're not talking about Craig Bellamy's expletive of choice, as discussed in some detail in Sir Bobby Robson's new autobiography.

Some schools have attempted to expel the F-word with the oxymoron that is the Non-Competitive Sports Day. Lest the little ones demand post-traumatic stress counselling after coming fifth in the sack race, events are created where nobody actually wins.

They're also banning Parents Races because their 'over zealous' desire to triumph is putting them at risk of injury. Teachers are concerned that aggressive behaviour displayed by pushy mums and dads could be a health and safety issue.

Yet everyone knows the only damage inflicted by 20 mothers thundering across the grass with their skirts tucked into their knickers is the extreme embarrassment suffered by their offspring.

Yet in the Olympics of life, youngsters need to know how to lose as well as win. How else will they cope with an outside world where even the fight for a parking space is an exercise in ruthless competition.

On the learning curve of sport, failure is as important a lesson as success. Paula Radcliffe will be a better athlete for weeping in a crumpled heap on an Athens roadside than if her career had never hit a pit-stop. Kelly Holmes endured years of setbacks before her golden double payback. Clive Woodward's selection nightmare gave Gavin Henson sleepless nights in New Zealand but he'll be stronger for it.

But perhaps the ultimate example of how to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same is the Welsh rugby team.

In Wales Grand Slam 2005 - the revealing official book of the campaign launched this week - the players give their own insights on how 27 years of failure turned into achievement.

'To find out where our success began you have to go back to some of the bad times we experienced together,' explains Gareth Thomas. 'You have to respect the foundations that were laid under previous coaches and you have to understand the feeling that existed between the players. We worked hard together and we grew together.'

Martyn Williams, the Six Nations player of the tournament, agrees the team's strength was forged when they refused to give up in the dark days. 'Since we won the Grand Slam every other person has asked me what made the difference from previous seasons. After all, we are more or less the same group of players who over the previous two seasons conceded a Six Nations whitewash, got beaten in Italy and quite often failed to raise a smile for our fans. Well, the success of 2005 was a long time in the making and has to be put down to hard work, more hard work and even more hard work.

'As a group of players we never gave up on ourselves or each other and we always believed we had the talent to compete with other nations.'

Pupils who faced the ultimate shock cure. - The Birmingham Post (England)

Most adults recall windswept playgrounds and chilly classrooms with a sense of nostalgic dread.

But for Birmingham children whose illnesses prevented them from going to mainstream schools, such conditions provided the ultimate cure.

Now two former pupils of Uffculme Open Air School in Moseley, where two-sided classrooms were exposed to sun and rain, have written a book about their school and five others founded in the early part of the century.

Mrs Pauline Saul and Mrs Frances Wilmot tracked down old pupils and staff of the school, whose memories are recorded in the book, A Breath of Fresh Air: Birmingham's Open Air Schools 1911-1970.

The authors decided to chronicle their days at Uffculme after they met at a reunion in 1989.

Children were constantly weighed by staff to check their health and the schools were seen as a tremendous success before modern cures such as pencillin and the creation of the welfare state.

Mrs Wilmot, aged 54, of Leamington, Warwickshire, who went to Uffculme in the 1950s suffering from bronchitis and asthma, admitted the regime could be harsh but she enjoyed herself.

'We were all very happy there, which is surprising considering how spartan the regime was,' she said.

Other children who went to Uffculme agreed. Mrs Diane Smith, who attended from 1949-1955, said: 'Looking back on my time at Uffculme as an asthmatic child, they were the happiest days of my school life. The teachers were so kind and everyone so friendly.'

Mr John Bonner, who stayed at Uffculme during 1932, said: 'I owe a lot to Uffculme and I was loathe to leave after a year at this wonderful place. I never had one day out of work in 50 years after that.'

Many former pupils remember the cold winters when they would have to rest in their beds outside the building, play sports whilst stripped to the waist and run without shoes to toughen their feet.

Miss Margaret Wales, deputy head between 1941 and 1958, said: 'When it was very cold we kept having breaks to exercise, jumping up and down outside or walking round the classrooms swinging our arms on our chests. Sometimes we could only use pencils as the ink froze.'

Former teacher Mrs Moira Armson remembered keeping an eye on the children during their compulsory rest periods.

'Rest time with the canvas beds was diabolical. As the shed was open to the wind, rain and snow it was a very damp place. In cold weather the teacher who was on duty sat on a deck chair with about three blankets, two hot water bottles and a pillow.

'Woe betide anyone who caused us to get up out of our warm snug blankets.'

Uffculme was founded in 1911 by Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury who donated it, along with Cropwood and Hunter's Hill schools, to the Birmingham Schools Medical Service. Their success led to the foundation of three other schools.

The Cadbury family continued to give their support and patronage, and one pupil remembered being treated to the family's famous chocolate at Christmas.

Others remembered the hardships. As well as up to two spoonfuls of cod liver oil a day, many children were academically and emotionally behind those who went to mainstream schools because of their condition.

Former nurse Mrs Kathleen Crosby saw hundreds of sick children at Uffculme between 1957 and 1965.

'Many suffered from general debility or were underweight, poorly, run down, often absent from school,' she said.

'There were also cases of nervous instability and malnutrition and children who didn't fit into ordinary schools because of things like chronic eczema.

'I enjoyed my time there and loved the children. If you treated them as though you loved them they responded.'

Four of the schools were located in rural Warwickshire and Worcestershire. It meant that children from poor districts in Birmingham, where the asthma rate was high, could enjoy a rural environment.

A Breath of Fresh Air is published by Phillimore & Co and costs pounds 30. Copies can be ordered by post from Mrs Frances Wilmot, 41 Helmsdale Road, Lillington, Leamington Spa, CV32 7DN, tel 01926 426597.

The ultimate question 2.0; how net promoter companies thrive in a customer-driven world, rev.ed.(Brief article)(Book review) - Reference & Research Book News

9781422173350

The ultimate question 2.0; how net promoter companies thrive in a customer-driven world, rev.ed.

Reichheld, Fred.

Harvard Bus. School Press

2011

290 pages

$27.95

Hardcover

HF5415

Reichheld, a customer, employee, and partner loyalty specialist, and Markey, who specializes in customer strategy and marketing, identify ways organizations can achieve growth through customer loyalty. They offer a new approach to identifying customers who love the company, those who hate it, and those who are neutral by compiling a score from their Net Promoter tool and using it to make improvements. This edition has been updated and expanded with new stories of companies like Charles Schwab, Apple, Ascension Health, Progressive, and Virgin Media. It has a new introduction on the evolution of the system and new chapters on the practices of Net Promoter practitioners who have achieved results since the first edition.

The ultimate teen guide series.(Book review) - Kliatt

THE ULTIMATE TEEN GUIDE SERIES. Asthma. Penny Hutchins Paquette. 171p. 978-0-8108-5759-9. $14.95. Diabetes. Katherine J. Moran. 181p. 978-0-8108-5642-4. $14.95. Learning disabilities. Penny Hutchins Paquette & Cheryl GersonTuttle. 301p. 978-0-8108-5643-1. $17.95. Sexual decisions. L. Kris Gowen. 227p. 978-0-8108-5805-3. $17.95. Stress relief. Mark Powell. 99p. 978-0-8108-5806-0. $14.95. Scarecrow Trade, dist. by National Book Network. c2007, illus, bibliog. index. JSA

This is an excellent series of books. The authors are qualified; e.g., the author of Sexual Decisions has a Ph.D. in child and adolescent development, an Ed.M. in human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and currently teaches human sexuality and women's health at the university level. She certainly mentions abstinence, and more importantly, she makes sure teenagers understand which sexual practices count as abstinence and which don't. She covers just about any possible sexual choice or situation teenagers may wonder about.

The book Stress Relief is especially important in the series, since it must speak to just about every teenager. The author is a physical education teacher at a Waldorf school, and he is a certified Rolfer, nutritional consultant, and spiritual practitioner. The main principle is that each person has within himself the ability to be calm and at peace, regardless of the outside influences in each life that make a person feel stressed. The big three approaches are: exercise, good nutrition, and good sleep. He also discusses breathing techniques and meditation. He talks about how perfectionism, guilt, shame, and fear work against us and how to deal with these feelings. He recommends therapy for those who find it difficult to understand why they feel the way they do. His 'voice' is encouraging and reasonable.

Asthma and Diabetes cover all the basics and focus on teenagers coping with these diseases. The longer book Learning Disabilities is helpful, again especially so since it explains these complex problems in a way adolescents can understand. Claire Rosser, KLIATT

J--Recommended for junior high school students. The contents are of particular interest to young adolescents and their teachers.

S--Recommended for senior high school students.

THE `ULTIMATE' VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE - The Herald News - Joliet (IL)

It is called the 'ultimate' volunteer experience.For example, the volunteer in this scenario sits down with a needy family. A short time later the family members are all smiles.

The family has 1,200 reasons to smile.

The family is $1,200 richer.

Can volunteering be any more satisfying in such a short time?

All volunteering has tangible and intangible rewards, but being a volunteer in the local tax counseling project for low-income families may provide the fastest fulfillment.

The tax project works this way:

Tax counseling volunteers (which could be you) meet with low-income families from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays at Joliet's Farragut School, 701 Glenwood Ave.

A line of interested families forms even before the doors open.

A couple of rooms are used for tax counseling.

More rooms are available.

That's why more volunteers are needed.

The demand is great.

I'm assured that volunteer training is not complicated, but four hours of training must be completed.

This local effort started Jan. 28 and concludes on tax day, April 15. The tax project is operated by an organization called the Center for Law and Human Services.

This statewide effort last year helped 11,449 families.

This statewide effort last year helped those folks receive $7 million in tax returns.

It is money that people might not have otherwise been received.

Families with household incomes of less than $26,000 and individuals with incomes of less than $20,000 are eligible.

The volunteers help the families claim the earned income tax credit and other benefits which they might not have claimed.

This is money owed to the families.

It is estimated that there might be 2,000 eligible families in Joliet.

The families being served may not have filed tax returns, might not have claimed the tax credit or were discouraged by long and complicated IRS forms.

Follow-up studies indicate these refunds are put back into the community in practical ways such as paying bills.

Everyone gains in this tax counseling project, but none more than the volunteers who bring smiles (and big refunds) to needy families.

Can you volunteer? Call (800) 557-4703. A training session is set for 5 to 9 p.m. on Tuesday at Farragut school.

The local tax counseling project is being promoted by the Partnership for a Healthier Community, directed by Mary Ruth Herbers.

The tax refunds will help needy families and impact the community's health.

An Ultimate Transformation Moment: Obesity - Sentinel

We are facing a tremendous problem in our country today. This problem is even more prevalent in our African American and Latino communities. The problem is obesity. Statistics indicate that 16-33% of adolescent children between ages 4-13 are considered obese. The rate of obesity among teenagers from ages 13-17 is already at 30%. By the end of 2010, 40%, almost half, of our children will be considered obese or overweight. Obesity leads to many ailments that children in the above groups are experiencing, such as early diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and very high cholesterol levels.

In 2009, more than 300,000 children passed due to problems associated with being overweight. We have to come up with a solution.

Let's look at the contributing factors to obesity in our families today. The first is the intake of foods that are high in calories. Our fast food nation has provided our communities with a constant supply of oversized portions that are excessively high in calories. In an economy that has parents working several jobs to continue to pay the mortgage, in many instances, cooking at home has become one of many casualties. With less time spent at home, picking up fast food provides a convenience. However, when we cook at home, we are in control of the ingredients that are used in the preparation of our meals.

Second is the lack of exercise or physical activity. As programs have been removed from our children's schools, this has directly affected the physical activity that children engage in on a daily basis. Additionally, the interaction in the home has changed quite significantly. When children and adults arrive home, more time is being spent in front of the television, computer, or video game. Families spend more time inside engaging in activities that may be considered, low activity level, or are passive in nature. Minimal physical activity is required and children do not go outside to play, for many reasons.

Lastly, there is sometimes a general lack of communication within our families and within our communities. We live 'separate' lives. Children may come home and sit in their rooms with the doors closed. Residents of the same neighborhood may not interact with their neighbors, if they know them at all. We have lost the mechanism within the household to communicate the problems and situations that occur during the day. The lack of outlets to the everyday issues creates the feelings of lack of confidence, and low self esteem, which can affect personal achievement.

Within these three contributing factors to obesity, there is one underlying thread which has the ability to turn this dire dilemma around, and point us in the direction of a solution. The 'family structure' is the key. Within the family, parents play the biggest role in providing nutritional meal choices for all. Parents have the ability to place limits on the time that is spent on electronic entertainment. Finally, when the family chooses to come together, and actually spend time together, at some point in each day, time can be spent opening, the lines of communication. Communi-cation provides the support that each member of the family needs. Support allows children the capability to find their voice, and in doing so, they then grow in confidence. As confidence grows, so grows self esteem.

In the next couple of weeks, I will review the family structure, and the role that the structure plays in combating obesity and the resulting health issues. We will review a nutritional plan and an exercise program that a family can participate in together. How do we increase the communication to build self esteem? We will delve into this vital issue as well. Join me as we work together to solve this obesity problem today!

Peace and Be More!