We already have a pretty clear (albeit highly stereotyped) image of the sort of people who join college chess clubs, as opposed to say ending up captaining the football team.
Equally, we know the type of person who always agree to 'help out a good cause' by ending up on the executives of clubs and societies.
But always they are consigned to the dogsbody recording secretary role in the background ----- never the glamorous upfront president.
And we know the difference between those natural leaders of every classroom (the students who can charm teacher or pupils alike without ever reading the course materials) and their opposites : the charisma-less swots with their heads in the books who always get the best marks.
Martin Henry Dawson's older brothers were more in the charming and natural leader category, while he was 100% full swot.
And yet, a clue as to how he 'led without being a natural leader' might lie in his strong sense of justice and instinctive support for the underdog.
Right up to his dying day, for a good cause, Henry Dawson never could say no.
And in his own modest way: once onboard, he wouldn't let go either.
All in all, a man very easy to badly underestimate....
+++++
So far, I have found him as business manager for his high school annual yearbook cum newspaper, secretary (treasurer) of his university chess club and of his undergraduate medical student society.
He was secretary of innumerable organizations over his entire life.
Someone willing to step into the breech, hardworking reliable, honest but not a dynamic or aggressive leader.
And he was also 'one council rep among many' on numerous occasions.
But for the very few times he headed up ending any organization, I think only special circumstances (no other candidate?) put him there.
It seemed he was never the natural choice of the membership considering who to vote for to represent their organization.
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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