Booknotes

Reverend FLOYD FLAKE, AUTHOR, "THE WAY OF THE BOOTSTRAPPER": Well, actually, my relationship to Bill Bennett goes way back when I was the dean at Boston University and Bill Bennett was there as assistant to the president. We worked together. So our relationship actually transcends politics. And when I asked him to do it, he said he would review it. He did. He felt that the book--some portions of it he didn't agree with but that overall, he thought it was a great book.

Maxine the same way. I mean, we served together for 11 years in the House of Representatives, so we have a good relationship, close relationship. And I felt also that it, in many ways, reflects my overall political ideology, and that is kind of at the center where I deal with people as opposed to just being an ideologue one way or the other. So if you get people who are about 180 degrees apart on the cover of your book, it means that this is not just something that you do on a haphazard basis, but you actually believe in people relationships, regardless of their ideology.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. Well, George Will called me one day and ha--had heard about all of the things we were doing in the church and in the ministry and asked if he could come and visit. So we had him to come. He came to the school and saw what we were doing with the kids, saw what we'd done to revitalize the community, felt it was a great thing and wrote an editorial on it, and so I thought that was great. And Bob Johnson and I have had a great relationship. We frequently sit and eat together and talk about futuristic ideas, and when I was in Congress, kind of shared a lot of ideas with him about what I wanted to do, and even when I left, he was one of the persons I sat and talked with. So we've had that kind of relationship over the years.

Rev. FLAKE: Eleven years, served from 1986 until the end of '97, and when I ran for office, I told the constituents that I'd serve from 10 to 12 years, and so left at the end of 11, so that's about as close to a promise as you can keep.

Rev. FLAKE: I left midterm, yeah, and a--at the last--because I had just finished--we'd just finished building a $23 million church, and it was growing so fast that I never had established a residence here in Washington. I traveled--each night, I commuted to New York back and forth. So I just reached that point where the responsibilities there had become so great, I couldn't do both, and since I was called into the ministry at 15 and pastoring since 19, that's obviously my first love, and I made the decision to go home and minister at the church.

Rev. FLAKE: OK.

Rev. FLAKE: Right.

Rev. FLAKE: Oh.

Rev. FLAKE: That's interesting.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. Well, what it means essentially is that, as you know, most people are given to a great deal of verbiage. I mean, there's a lot of talk about what needs to be done, what we ought to be doing, how we solve problems and issues and so forth. I think what they're saying, in essence, is that the model that I've created, both in terms of my own personal life as one growing up in a family of 13 and fifth in a--sixth-grade-educated parents, a reality of what I've had to do to work my way through school and work my way into the various situations that mark a level of success. I think that's one category.

I think the other category is what I've tried to do in terms of changing the whole scope of ministry in an urban community from one of just a Sunday morning worship experience to one where we, in fact, build homes and sell them to first-time home buyers. We, in fact, built a school so I'm not--when I talk about educational issues, it is not just rhetoric. It is reality of what we've been able to do in transforming the lives of kids from communities where they say they can't--they can't learn. And when you look at the overall level of programs that we have--psychiatric services to medical services to--you name it--WIC programs and so forth--I think what they're saying, in essence, is that rather than just talking about it, I've tried to be that person who rolls up ones--my sleeves and become a real a bootstrapper and make things happen so that when people argue with me about things, I don't have to just lean on the rhetoric of it, but I can actually show them practical realities that, in fact, this works.

Rev. FLAKE: My church is in Jamaica, Queens. It is in--about seven minutes from Kennedy Airport and within about 20 minutes from La Guardia and sits in an area called St. Albans, which has historically been one of those communities that was for upward mobile people. It's a pretty middle-class community. Yet many of the amenities and services, quality of education, not nearly what it ought to be. And that's what we focused on, and--and it's been a very successful ministry for the last 23 years.

Rev. FLAKE: Twenty-five hundred, 2,500 seats in the church, and we run three services a Sunday there: 6:30 in the morning, 8:30, 11:15. I'm at all three services, and I preach two of them. And then I run another service for young people where we have 1,500 kids, 700 a week or so attending. And that's run at the same time as the 11:15 service in the old church building.

Rev. FLAKE: Oh, I would think--oh, I would not have any idea, but I...

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. I--not a whole lot. I think that's a pretty big number, but there are some bigger. I was in one last week over in Atlanta s--that has 7,500, so there's some big churches out there.

Rev. FLAKE: I write every sermon. Every week, I write two sermons, and I write them from start--from scratch, and I do that because I don't take the old material and just rehash it. I think--I think people get to a point where old sermons are pretty much like leftovers. They don't want to hear the same stuff over and over. And I think, as you know, if you make a choice of a fine restaurant where you go and eat, you go and eat there because you know there's a quality to the food and a quality that you can expect to be consistent. What I try to do is give people a quality, consistent message and a new message, a fresh message, and feed them a new word every week, and it pays off.

Rev. FLAKE: I think the ultimate tip is that, you know, one of the things they taught us at Xerox when I was a marketing anal--analyst was, you know, look at people, and if you see their heads shaking, you know that you have them in the s--on the same page with you. I think that's the first tip-off. I think the second thing becomes--last year alone, we had 1,100-and-some new members to join the congregation. So immediately after a sermon, there's always an invitation. At that point, generally, we average about 25, 30 people a Sunday, so we know that we're being effective to a major degree.

Rev. FLAKE: We raise, in the actual church offerings, about--last year, we raised $7.2 million. And we leveraged that to about $27 million in the various other kind of community projects we do. So we--we don't go to government or financial institutions asking to give us anything, but we say to them that, `With our $7.2 million, we want to leverage these dollars and get the best that we can so that we can offer the maximum amount of services to the community that's possible.'

Rev. FLAKE: Well, we would have--we--we--bo--a recent New York Times piece said that we controlled, managed or have some cont--involvement in 26 different blocks. That's about $50 million worth of development. And, of course, that includes the homes which we actually built and sold, so there are 173 of those. We no longer own them, but we do have a great deal of interest in building because we realized that stable families and stable communities generally rise in environments where people have a sense of homeownership. Homeownership gives them a stake in the community, a share of the American Dream, and their responses to homeownership is quite different from the response to rental. And so we feel it's important to do it. We also buy up boarded-up, vacant, commercial properties, any commercial properties around us in that 26-block area. We generally will buy those and put them back on the market, either for entrepreneurs or we use them for various programs that we have.

Rev. FLAKE: I gave up Congress in large measure that--because, one, I was a--at a point where the church was exploding. I needed to be there a little bit more as we moved into this new facility, and--and so that's a primary issue. The other issue is, having served 11 years, I felt that it was time for me to move on. I went to Congress with an idea that I could take the model of ministry I had, expand that to some degree in terms of community economic development, by getting projects into the community.

Right now, that is the only congressional district in the country, except maybe Mr. Byrd in West Virginia, I'm not sure, but certainly one of the few where you would have three federal projects currently being built--two regional buildings, the FDA and the FAA, as well as a rail link. And that brings jobs into the community. It changes the aesthetics of the community. And what I wanted to do was take the time from being locked into this Congress where I was on somebody else's schedule, to free myself, to travel this country, as I do, to teach other ministers, to be able to energize them and inspire them to turn their communities around as well. So in essence, I--I traveled to about 35 different states last year either doing ministerial workshops or different kind of groups. I do a session at Harvard with 40 ministers that they bring in in the summertime. And that allows me to be able to help to get them to see a new approach to dealing with ministry, which is community development.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, it stuck with me over the years. When I was growing up, people used to talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and then we went through a period where it was almost presented as a negative if you talk about bootstraps, because we got into this sense that you can't ask people who are victims to lift themselves up by bootstraps if they have no boots. Well, I began to think about this and came to the realization that coming out of my kind of background and watching the people who were able to rise to level of--levels of success, the question was not about not having bootstraps but, in fact, knowing that we all had bootstraps, and our bootstraps were our dreams, our imaginations, our sense of destiny, what we wanted to do with our lives and teachers who challenged us to look within ourself and find our inner strength and grow from those strengths, as opposed to what others perceived to be our weaknesses.

And so out of that challenge, I felt it was important to try to reshape the notion of what bootstrapping is, to put it into some kind of language that people could understand and connect with a historical past where people did not give up so easily or allow themselves to rise to points of depression simply because they did not have, as measured by material things, but understand that within them, they have the strength to be able to overcome various kinds of backgrounds, various kinds of discriminations and be able to do something positive with their life.

Rev. FLAKE: My kids are 22, the one that just graduated last Sunday; one is 20, who is in college; one is 18, who is in college; and then I have a 14-year-old who is finishing his first year of high school.

Rev. FLAKE: Right.

Rev. FLAKE: That's correct. Well, it's a sensible thing to do. Once you--you--you know, they both go to Spelman College, and now that he's at Morehouse, I would have been paying room and board for three kids, so this way, with buying a house--because I teach in the church homeownership and use of money so that you invest in appreciating assets. So when we did the analysis and realized that paying room and board would not get us any tax benefits or long-term equity, it just made sense, if they were all going to be in one city, put them in a house together. Now their problem is how they're going to live together in terms of how they share the food and the bathrooms and so forth, but at least they're in the house.

Rev. FLAKE: That's right. Right.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, what happened was, about a year and a half ago, I had a meeting. I meet on Monday nights with about 120 men, and I was looking at the stock market as--at that point, I guess it was doing about 7,000. And I said to the men that night, `You know, the stock market about three or four years ago was doing 4,000, and people were rejoicing about it. Today the market hit 7,000. Does that mean anything to anyone in this room? How many of you have investments in stocks and bonds?' Only three hands went up. And when that--when I saw that, I said, `My God, I have to do something about this.' So I asked them where their investments were, and to my surprise, the majority of them talked about either their home, which was great, or an insurance policy. And I related to them that if you look at the fine print, insurance policies pay 3 1/4 percent, 3 1/2 percent after you die. And the rest of them had their money in savings, and I said, `How can you be in a city like New York and not understand that you can be a player, you can be involved?'

We keep talking about being a people of poverty. We're not a people of poverty. We have to learn to take advantage of opportunities. So I started one investment club, and they grew--it grew so fast that we had to s--kind of branch out. Now we have 12 clubs. They focus on various areas, one in tel--telecommunications, real estate, utilities. Everything the market is involved in, we have a club, basically, that deals with it, and--and it's been very good, very positive as a learning experience.

Rev. FLAKE: Well--well, the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil.

Rev. FLAKE: It's a matter of priority. It's a matter of where you put your treasure and how you manage that treasure, so that if money becomes your predominant guiding force, in reality, you will do almost anything to get it and almost anything to keep it, even if it means ruining the lives of other people. If you put it in the proper perspective, though, you realize that in a capitalistic society that you have an opportunity to make the kind of investments, starting with homeownership--I think that's just one great starting block because it builds equity without you having to put much into it other than whatever you do to maintain and keep the home up, but also beyond that, once you build that equity, you have a primary asset out of which you can draw from, send kids to college, start a business, do whatever you want to do.

And so it is not quite an issue about money itself. It's how you deal with it, and my concept is simply you don't have to wait to face the eschatic, logical reality of death in order to enjoy the privileges of heaven. Everybody ought to enjoy the privileges of their definition of heaven right here, and you can't do that without money.

Rev. FLAKE: I have 10,850 as of December 31st. It's grown considerably since then, but--and so it's about 11,000--a little over 11,000 members.

Rev. FLAKE: One school for 480 kids to 500, depending on the mix, but we keep a base of 480, and about 150 on the waiting list.

Rev. FLAKE: The Allen AME Church in Jamaica, New York.

Rev. FLAKE: Richard Allen was a person who bought his own freedom. He had been a slave in Delaware and was able to buy his freedom and move to Philadelphia, and on a particular Sunday, as they were worshipping in the balcony, they made a decision--he and those who were his followers--to come down to the altar and worship to pray. As they got on their knees to pray, they were physically removed from the church, St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. So he went a block away and bought a blacksmith shop, and in that blacksmith shop, they were able to start a church, and eventually those free slaves built a church from the ground up, which still stands today and serves as the mother church of the denomination. So--and then Richard Allen also, in--in Philadelphia, when they had the plague that swept through that city, it was his group that worked to bury people and developed a burial association and did work for the city that was historical, and out of that, a denomination grew that has about three million members now.

Rev. FLAKE: I've been in Allen Church for 23 years. I came in 1976. I had been the dean of students at Boston University, and a bishop asked me if I would come and--and take the church and I did, and I--at that point, I thought I was headed toward college presidency, and as fate would have it, New York has turned out to be a great and wonderful blessing for me. So it's been 23 good years.

Rev. FLAKE: I pastored, yes. I kept the church while I was there, and I was a member of the House, and as I said, it--I committed--I commuted every night and came back in the mornings. I helped with homework at night or went to the church and worked and then dropped the kids off on the way to the airport and commuted back here. And so I felt that it was important to be there for the kids. They did not need a politician who had no relationship to the family, and so I made it my business to make sure that unless we got out after 8:00 from Congress, I was home. Otherwise, I was on the next shuttle on my way to--to--to my house.

Rev. FLAKE: They were--it's--they were two full-time--more than full-time jobs because, you know, it became a matter of time management so that when I was in the city, I learned that you don't sit at a banquet or a luncheon for three hours. You actually sit as long as is necessary, do what you have to do and move on. So it was a matter of kind of mixing those schedules, and it worked out very well, as members in the church were very cooperative and supportive. But I also came back and preached every Sunday morning. During that time, I took very few outside engagements, so they did not feel that I had disconnected from the church but, in fact, that I was still pastor.

Rev. FLAKE: Under the rules at various points--you know, the rules kept changing while I was there. At a point, you could have been a lawyer, as later, the move--rules were modulated for some of the members who came as medical doctors, but at a point, you couldn't do it, and then by the time I left, you could. But there was always a provision that allowed a clergyman to continue to pastor. I could not receive a salary from the church that exceeded 15 percent of my salary, but otherwise, I could--I could do the functions there.

Rev. FLAKE: I was born in Los Angeles at the end of my father's military term. He served with the--three years in the Army, but Houston is what I called home because I was less than six months when they moved back home, and so that's where I grew up.

Rev. FLAKE: My father was a janitor most of his life. My mother was a housewife. My father worked two and three jobs at a time because he was determined that we would not go on welfare and that mother would not have to work. And so what he did was, he had a day job, and he'd come home about 3:30, we'd eat as a family, unless we were involved in something at school, and then he would go to the night job, taking one of the boys with him, and, in essence, at the night job, he would sleep after showing us what needed to be done, and we learned how to do office cleaning from the time I was about 10 years old until I graduated and left for high school. My brother had done it before me. My brothers who came behind me had to do it. So we learned that kind of work ethic.

Mother was home. She taught us all--boys and girls--how to cook, wash, iron, sew. We could do everything in the house, and the house was clean when we left in the mornings on the bus. And then what we did after we went, whoever did not go with him to help clean up the offices went with him on the paper route. He'd come home and sleep about three or four hours and get up and we had the morning paper route in the community. And, of course, one would sit in the backseat and roll the papers, put them over the seat, and then he would drive through the community throwing the newspapers. So what we learned from him was a very strong work ethic and a sense of responsibility for family. What we learned from mother was a real keen sense of what it means to love as a family, and we also learned from her how you not only assume responsibility but how you manage your time to get things done that you would not otherwise get done.

Rev. FLAKE: No, no. We have eight--eight who are living now, four boys and four girls, most of whom are in Houston.

Rev. FLAKE: I am number three--number three in the age category, so I automatically assumed a great deal of responsibility, and as the oldest boy after my brother left to go to the Air Force and the sister between us had died from jaundice when she was about four years old, so that most of the responsibility fell on me for a few years. But, you know, you--you assume those responsibilities as a child. You grow up with that. And I would confess that I became a workaholic as a child, or a bootstrapper, and that followed me for the rest of my life.

Rev. FLAKE: Wilberforce was a freedom fighter and--in England, and made some declarations about education and the value of higher education and then, in a trip to America, started the first African-American college in this country. And so I went to Wilberforce University because he started the college with a denomination that I'm a part of, the AME Church, out in Xenia, Ohio, and because I had accepted the ministry at the age of 15, I felt that it was imperative that I go to the denominational school. Plus, if I had stayed in Houston and gone to Texas Southern or Prairie View, I probably would have run track or something, but I probably wouldn't have graduated, just given the reality of what most of the kids who--who left my community and went to school did. So I made a decision to leave home, which my mother didn't understand why you had to go that far away for education, but I did it, and so I went to Wilberforce, and it was a good education and went on to seminary from there.

Rev. FLAKE: I graduated in '67--1967.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. I--I lived with--there was a teacher, Mrs. Ware, who was a French teacher, and she had a heart attack. She could not take care of the responsibilities of her house, so she put a notice up that she was looking for someone to live in and take care of the house, so mother's training paid off, and I'm glad she made no distinction between boy jobs and girl jobs. We all learned to do everything. And so I moved in, and I kept the floors and--and washed the dishes and cooked for her and made the bed and did everything and basically took care of her. She was about 70 years old, and I felt very good about not only helping her but I didn't have to pay rent, so it was good for me.

Rev. FLAKE: I met my first wife in a church in--I think it was Middletown, Ohio, i--in that--in that region, and--beautiful lady, and her father was a minister, and we got married very young, too young. Everybody told us...

Rev. FLAKE: I was 21 when I got married. And young because I was still in seminary, so I did not have a full-time job. I was a social worker in the child development center, and she was in school, so I made sure she stayed in school. So what happened--once we got married, the stresses and strains of finance and so forth just weighed heavily on us. When I got the offer to come t--and then I took a job at Reynolds Tobacco my last year of seminary, and then I got the offer to come to Lincoln University as an associate dean, so she went there with me. But we were still in stress because our debts had mounted, and the marriage didn't survive.

So what I do in the book is talk about the fact that no matter how hard you try, it is always possible that you're going to have some crises in your life, and you have to learn how, if you have a bootstrapper's spirit, to really live beyond the crises and not sc--spend your lifetime blaming the other person. I don't blame her for what happened. She doesn't blame me. We had a chance to sit down a few years later and talk about it and, you know, I think we--we didn't take it as--as difficult as many people take a--a separation and a divorce. And then I waited four years because I didn't want to bring the baggage of that marriage into a new marriage, and I've been married now for almost 24 years, and that's been good.

Rev. FLAKE: Then I went to Xerox...

Rev. FLAKE: ...as a marketing analyst, and then I was recruited to Lincoln by my former college dean. I was associate dean.

Rev. FLAKE: In Pennsylvania as the associate dean there. And then Boston University asked me to come to direct the Martin Luther King African-American Center. I did that all three years because the second year, the chaplain died. They asked me to take over as interim chaplain, and then in the third year, the dean of students lost his job, and I was also the dean of students at--on the campus. So it was great for me because one of the things I'd said to Dr. Silber, who was the president when I came to BU, was I would take the King Center job, but I don't want to be relegated to mere African-American jobs. I want to be a part of this campus and community and university, and I think I bring skills that would allow me to be useful here. So immediately after the chaplain's death, he called me and put me in the chaplain and elevated me to dean of students, so it was a good experience.

Rev. FLAKE: I went to Allen Church in 1976, when the bishop asked me if I would come and pastor full-time, which I had never done and pretty much had made up my mind I wouldn't do that. A--as I said, I thought I'd be a college president. But it seemed like a great opportunity. It had about 1,100 members then, active, and about 1,400 on the rolls. So it was a good, strong, solid church with a foundation. And the first question I asked was, what--were they willing to be involved in education. And we started the process of fund-raising for the school, which we opened in '82.

Rev. FLAKE: Mm-hmm.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, what happened there was we had a--as the church grew and if you know, not only churches but almost any organization, when you have as rapid a growth as we were having, we ran into some situations with a few of the officers, who, basically, initially liked the growth, but then reached a point where they were concerned because many of the people were coming with different ranges of skills that they didn't have. I mean, we had MBAs and lawyers and all kinds of people. They saw themselves, unfortunately--I guess, the biblical analogy would be as grasshoppers among giants, which was not true because they were the treasurer or the secretary of the board and so forth and--and--and the chief officers. But they did not see themselves as fitting in as the church grew.

And what essentially they did was went to Internal Revenue and said I was stealing money. Now the interesting thing about that is when I came we had much more of a cash-based operation, and I changed the cash-based operations to voucher-based operations, where you actually had to have a voucher to get any money. And so we moved away from that operation. So all of the operations then were check-based. You had to have a check to do any kind of business with the church.

So it was an accusation that I don't think they expected to ever reach the level of a federal trial. But by this time, I had been elected to Congress, and, of course, I was in the public light. And so my wife and I went to a federal trial with these accusations about having stolen church money. They subpoenaed every organization, the 11 corporations of the church. We spent about $2 million defending ourselves and the church, only to go to trial, and after four weeks having the Justice Department drop its own case based on the fact that they did not have enough evidence.

Well, when I say it affected the church in terms of growth, the daily reporting in the paper was so positive because as those persons who had made the accusations got on the witness stand, they in fact testified for us because they begin to talk about the success of the church. They looked at checks and said, `Yes, we wrote the checks.' I wrote no checks. So all the checks were written to me, whether they were for vacation or whatever they were for. And when the trial was over, two people from the jury came and joined the church. And from that, when people that seen what this church had done in community development, the church began to grow. I mean, our fastest growth came the year after we had had that trial. And that year was phenomenal growth. So I think it was a blessing for the church overall, even though it was a very painful, traumatic experience.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. These three guys had made me hire a--a--an administrative assistant. And the administrative assistant put herself in a position where she basically took credit for the accomplishments of the church, and with these three persons--which was shocking to me, because, I mean, these were like brothers to me. We were very close.

Rev. FLAKE: Did not know her before she came into the church.

Rev. FLAKE: About 20--in her late 20s, I think. And I was in my late 30s at that point.

Rev. FLAKE: This was in--we hired her in 1983, and I terminated her in 1985, and got elected in '86. So...

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. Well, she seemed to have--I think she started the process and I think they basically supported her in terms of getting it to the federal--to the federal level. For some reason they saw fit, there was--I think it really had also to do with the fact that I had defeated a state senator, who then took a role on the State Commission on Investigation, which was a special commission something like, I guess, the independent counsel, whose responsibility was to investigate corruption in politics.

So nothing occurred until the time I got elected to a political office. And when I defeated him--remember, I had not been in politics. I ran for the office. He was the state senator who was supposed to come to Congress. And an assemblyperson ran who was supposed to replace him. And somebody else was supposed to replace--so I basically messed up the pecking order by running out of order, having never served in the political office. And from that state investigation commission she made some contacts, and from that relationship, managed to get to the Feds. And before long, the Feds were subpoenaing and everything. And I didn't even know about it until it began to come out in the newspapers.

Rev. FLAKE: Yes. They were--we were indicted.

Rev. FLAKE: My wife was indicted as a co-conspirator or co--co-involved person in this process.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, my wife has a lot more hard feelings against people than I do. I--I think I've been a lot more forgiving in this process. But I don't think my wife will ever be totally forgiving of it, because these people were so close to us that we could not believe that this could happen. We could believe that the young lady could do it. And as you know, she even--we didn't even know where the sexual harassment charges were coming from, because she's been--had been out of the church a couple of years. And then we realized that all of this was one big case and that the level of involvement had to do with basically be--besmirching me in such a way that by the time they got their trial to court I would not be as clean as my reputation was.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, it happens all the time. I mean, I--I think churches are no different from other organizations. You're dealing with human beings who have the same basic needs that Peter Drucker and others in management talk about--recognition and, you know, a need to--to be involved in a process where they have some sense of power and authority in that relationship. And so I think what happens is that at a point when people get power in a church and they've had it for a long time, and you then begin to stretch the band, so to speak, by including other people, they begin to have that feeling that they are less value than they were. And now as you begin to expand the base of leadership, it becomes a difficult problem because people are no longer looking to two or three people as leaders, they're looking at a number of leaders, a--a m--a myriad of leaders. And that becomes difficult for people who have historically had the primary resp--role of--of authority.

Rev. FLAKE: That is correct.

Rev. FLAKE: That happened during this crisis, leading up to the crisis. I--I'd reached a point where if I got out of the bed in the morning I was leaning almost to the level of my stomach. I mean, I--I could not stand up straight because I was in severe pain. Went to doctors, and they said, `There's nothing physically wrong with you. It has to be nerve-related.' And when they said that, I realized that at a point--you know, I'm the kind of guy who generally accepts a lot of things. My wife says I do it to the point until I'm painted in a corner and then I react. Well, at that point, I realized I was in the corner. And that's when I began to move and terminated the young lady and move these persons off of the board and decided that I was gonna get my health together. And I did by just making decisions that I had long delayed in making and realized I had to do it.

Rev. FLAKE: What I recommend to people in that--in that stage is that, one, you confront the problem. Don't act as if the problem is not there and try to carry the burden of that problem by yourself. Physically, we don't know how weak we really are until we're in a crisis and we have to confront it rather than let it defeat us. And it will destroy us if we don't. And what I tell people in the book essentially is that once you confront that problem, you make your decisions, you move on those decisions. Whatever the cost of it, you have to pay that cost. And somehow or another, in the end, if you're right, I tend to believe you will come out better than you were if you didn't confront the situation.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. Yeah.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah. Well, you know, what I--what I realized after the kids started moving to Atlanta to go to college, I did not want them on the highway driving their own cars. So in order to move the cars back and forth between New York and--and Atlanta in the summertime, I would drive. Well, I'd leave like 10:00 at night, and I can get there by 10 the next morning. And what I say in the book is essentially I drive the way I lead my life. I like to be in the fast lane.

And so leaving at that hour, I'm able to drive much faster than I can during the daytime, and I find that the police generally are, you know, resting or whatever they're doing at that time of night. And at the same time, as I see the clusters of light ahead, I just wind my way around until I'm back in the front. I figure I can't have an accident unless I fall asleep if I'm in the lead. And that's the way I do in life. I--I--I kind of maneuver my way around. When I see the boxes--I call them the boxes--and when the boxes are in the way, rather than getting in the boxes, I find myself move around--moving around them, doing whatever is necessary to get to that point where I'm in the fast lane. I get upset when people drive slow in my lane.

They just--you know, in the book I talk about the people who won't and the people who do. And people who won't generally get in the way of people who do. They want you to do for them, but they won't do anything for themselves. And then they just get in your way and try to block you. So that's the way I lead life is that--moving all the time.

Rev. FLAKE: That's right.

Rev. FLAKE: That was--yeah--well, what happened was, because of my denomination, there was about to be a meeting at which the young lady had threatened that she was gonna come and--and essentially blow up the meeting--I mean--you know, with some accusations and things from the floor. So that the bishop asked if I would meet with them--I met with them in a public place, the La Guardia Airport, without the knowledge that--with this other investigation that we were not knowledgeable of going on that they had, in fact, set me up. So that when I looked around, there were--there were cameras there from local newspapers. And so I just left. I mean, I just made a decision that this was not the way this was going to be resolved. And I had made a decision I was not going to give money for a situation from which I was innocent. And so after that, I had no more meetings. I just made a decision that whatever came through the court process, I'd have to deal with.

Rev. FLAKE: My trial started in 1991. My trial was in--oh, we started that trial in the summer of '91.

Rev. FLAKE: My trial lasted four weeks almost.

Rev. FLAKE: Three and half weeks.

Rev. FLAKE: The verdict--there was no verdict. The Justice Department--the judge said that if they could not present evidence in the next week that he would drop the charges. But they came in the next week and asked for a dismissal of the case.

Rev. FLAKE: They--they came and brought civil action for the same things for which they had brought criminal action, which me and my wife paid about $200,000. And it was in things that were--we thought was ridiculous because the average pastor gets paid vacation pay, various kinds of meetings. The church supported those things. The problem was they were not documented. And so over a seven-year period, they came up with what they considered to be seven--$200,000 or so worth of civil charges. And I think that was in large measure because they spent $7 million to $10 million investigating us. And in the end, I think they had to show something for all of that money and all of that time that they had put into the case.

Rev. FLAKE: I have about $400,000 now in legal debts that I still owe. And, you know, every now and then we have a little fund-raiser so we can keep the interest up and, you know, it'll get paid over time. And I--I just--I don't worry about it now. I just feel that it's gonna get paid when we can pay it. Some miracle's gonna happen and it's gonna happen.

Rev. FLAKE: My chest pains just kind of dissipated after I got to a point of confronting the issues and realizing that I had to go on with life and move these people out of the way, almost miraculously. I was able to stand, the pains were gone and I started an exercise program. And since that point, I've been in probably the better--best health that I've ever been in in my life. Because after paying twice to health spas and not going, I decided to bring equipment in the house and start exercising. And that has made all the difference in the world. So at 5:30 in the morning, I do a section here called stretch; 5:30 in the morning, I'm up and I'm on the equipment and now my wife is doing the same thing. And changed my eating habits, and--and so now I--I offer as a means of dealing with some of our issues, a--a--a method for physical, emotional and spiritual health in synergy with one another, as well as changing one's diet to be able to better cope. Because I work 16 hours a day, and I can't afford to carry the burden of either overweight or lack of being in good shape.

Rev. FLAKE: Right.

Rev. FLAKE: I--I have been thinking of a book for, I guess, about the last seven or eight years. I've had people like Dr. Cohen up at Union Seminary and Gayraud Wilmore, who has written extensively, to tell me I should do a book on the work that I'd done in the ministry. When I came out of Congress, I realized that this was the time. I wrote my doctoral dissertation traveling back and forth to Washington, buying all the books at the dining table and writing all night long and then flying back to Washington in the morning. And then after leaving Congress, I said to myself, `Now if I could do that while I was in Congress and I keep saying--procrastinating about writing a book, why can't I now, before I get too engaged in too many other things, begin the process of writing a book?'

And so in February '98, two months out of having left Congress, I began to sit and put together an outline, not knowing exactly which way I would go with it. But my former chief of staff, Marshall Mitchell, introduced to me to Imar Hutchins, who's a book agent. And we began to sit. And I told him what I wanted to do. I wanted to write this book about bootstrapping. They thought it was a great idea. And we began to market a proposal. And by, I think, April--end of April, first of May--HarperCollins had approached me and said they were interested in looking at me as an author. And so we came to a deal, and--and here's the book.

Rev. FLAKE: Donna Marie Williams is a young lady that they gave me to help in editing the book, who did a tremendous job in trying to keep me focused on not only shaping the outline but gave me outlines and details on how she felt we could make a book that was marketable, and in the final analysis, giving me the leeway to just go on and write myself. But I think she laid out a good track for us in terms of just an outline that we could work from.

Rev. FLAKE: Yes.

Rev. FLAKE: She said to me that I would not accept her ideas about it; therefore, we've had no major discussion on that. No, I have not read that book.

Rev. FLAKE: Yeah, I think on her "Black-Eyed Peas for the Soul" was just kind of a play-off of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" model in terms of giving advice to people. And the last book, I'm not sure she's quite finished yet. It may be on the shelves, but I'm not sure.

Rev. FLAKE: Oh, yeah. I wrote--I generally do my best writing after midnight. Between 12 and 6, I get a lot done.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, you know, it--it's--it's a strange thing. I--my adrenaline gets to flowing when I'm in the middle of a project, whether that's building and developing something or whether it's writing. If that's my focus, I'm able to do that. And generally, during those times I'll work on getting a nap for an hour or so during the day before I go into my evening schedule. And again, I find that being in good physical shape means that I need less sleep.

Rev. FLAKE: OK.

Rev. FLAKE: Cathy Sumler is a young lady who, in our church, started liturgical dance ministry. And it's a ministry that was not known particularly in the black church in a major kind of way. Now she has about 350 young women who are part of that dance ministry. And it is the most phenomenal thing in the world. It starts with little kids, and then intermediates and then young adults, and now we have a senior company. So she has five companies inclusive of men now. And she's just done a phenomenal job, and that's why she's there.

Rev. FLAKE: John Glenn is there because I think John Glenn represents something positive for me. When--when the first--when they did the first space shuttle, I was a kid in high school. The teacher made us not only watch it but do book reports on it. John Glenn's name was prominent then. And then to go and get elected to Congress and find John Glenn in the Senate, and then to see him at a latter age saying he wanted to go back in the shuttle and do it, I felt that was important, so people could see that you're not restricted by age. He had done it when he was young. He came back and did it when he was older. And I respect him highly.

Rev. FLAKE: Mr. Charles Gill is a local photographer in my community who has done most of my photography over the years. And Gill started his own business. He left a job in the private sector and decided he would start his own photography business, and he built that business. I write about him in my chapter on building a lasting legacy. He took one of his sons--he had three sons, one of them decided to work with him. Now he runs the business with his wife and he's passed it on to him, and I think that's a very positive story.

Rev. FLAKE: Dr. Ben Carson is a person who discovered, by working with a particular young man that had been given up med--for medical reasons, and the guy did more than what a doctor would be expected to do by staying with the kid and bringing about a cure to--to his life which transformed his own life.

Rev. FLAKE: Candy Lightner, I think, is a young lady who was involved in trying to get a mortgage. Went through a lot of discrimination, but was so determined to get it, that she stuck it out until she had gotten it.

Rev. FLAKE: Vesta, of course, as you know, is a--a singer. Vesta is one of those persons who struggled with trying to lose weight for a number of years and could not and then at a point made a decision that he was gonna do it and--and was finally able to get his life together and do what he had been cro--procrastinating about.

Rev. FLAKE: Chris Rock is one of those guys who's included because he demonstrates that success does not come without necessary--ily having some failures. His initial fa--foray into trying to being a comedian and trying to follow the lead of Eddie Murphy, he found himself failing at it. And then suddenly, his career took off because he kept on trying. So I have him here 'cause I think that's a--a true bootstrapping spirit.

Rev. FLAKE: Fred Smith is the founder of FedEx. And my wife is from Memphis, her family's there. So we get back and forth. I remember when FedEx was nothing. And as I go back and forth to Memphis and seeing the explosion of that company, I realize that this was a true bootstrapper. He thought he had an idea, and he used that idea to develop a whole revolutionary approach to--to delivering packages and mail and so forth.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, actually, Donna and I had a lot of discussions about them. And as she threw various names out and we talked about what they did, I felt that it was important to kind of include them in--in the book, to make it--to give it some substance and people understand that everybody who's a bootstrapper was not born with a silver spoon, but they came with the creative idea, or they gave themself in service to somebody, or they did something special. One of the real special ones in there that you didn't name was Freddie Dill. Freddie Dill came out of Georgia with a third-grade education, couldn't read or write. And he saw people losing their hubcaps because of the potholes in New York and decided that he would start repairing them. Now he has one of the largest tire distributor businesses in America. So--and now he reads and writes. And not only that, but I go in his office and he's sitting at his computer looking at his stock investments. So, I mean--and that's a real bootstrapping spirit.

Rev. FLAKE: That's right.

Rev. FLAKE: Mrs--Jewel Houston is in Houston, Texas. She's so special in my life because when I entered the ninth grade and went into high school, I was also engaged in a lot of church activities. She was a youth director for the Houston area for my denomination. She took me into the book store and gave me a position so that after lunch I had to come to the book store every day. She was sort of the book steward, who managed the books for the whole school. What she did, though, was made me do my homework while I was in the book store. And so that kind of vigilance in looking out for me--because she said she did not want me to lose my potential or get caught up in the things in high school that could destroy my ability to ultimately succeed. And so she--and then in the evenings, she drove me around to various youth meetings. On Saturdays, she'd pick me up and take me to those meetings because daddy was working all the time. He had one car, and he didn't all--allow entertainment miles on it. So she would drive me to those meetings. She propelled me into positions as YPD director for the city and, ultimately, for the state, and yout--youth of the year for the state. And so she's special because she's that teacher who took the time to--to help make my life.

Rev. FLAKE: That's correct. That's right.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, I came out for school choice not because I thought it was a conservative Repub--or Republican idea. I thought it was an idea that reflected what I had done. It goes back to your walking the walk and talking the talk. I developed a school in '82 because I felt that our kids were not getting a quality education from the system in the community in which we lived. And so my reality became one of being able to produce a better product out of--and not testing kids in--than the public school was doing in my community. And I see vouchers as a way of either forcing the system to do the necessary reforms to give the same quality of education in the subur--in the urban communities that they do in the suburbs, or forcing them to have to compete for students, which I think vouchers is designed to do. In the homestead, ultimately, the system will reform itself and provide a better education for the majority of kids.

Rev. FLAKE: I never say this is why, it just kind of evolves. If I see a problem, I think there has to be a solution to it.

Rev. FLAKE: I enjoy it the most at the end, when I can see that the effort, the energy, the time, the prayers, all that I put into it actually paid off.

Rev. FLAKE: Well, outside of Mother and Daddy, I think, Mrs. Houston, because of the amount of time she spent with me, the amount of time she spent encouraging me, making sure that I did not keep words like `can't' in my vocabulary. I had to expunge that word. Making me understand that I was not a second-class citizen, but that it would only cost a little more for me to go first class.

Rev. FLAKE: My wife is--my wife is a tremendous lady. As you know, she also has an earned doctorate. But more than that, it is her honesty, her candor, her support. Even when we disagree about what I should do, as was the case in running for Congress. As you might see in the book, I had now set an 8:00 service, I was not going to run because she wasn't in favor. But she showed up between that and the 11:00 service and said I had to run. And she supported me in the years that I was there.

Rev. FLAKE: I met Elaine at a church in Boston. We were going to--in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a matter of fact. She was a member of the choir. I was a member of the ministerial staff. And she's just such a dynamic lady. I mean, she speaks in her own right. She travels the country doing workshops and ministries. We do marriage enrichment workshops together. And I encouraged her to go and get her doctorate, and she did that. I think she's my partner as much as my wife and the best friend that I have.

Rev. FLAKE: I think what'll have to happen--has to happen with making this book a success is people read it and tell other people about it, because the action steps there have no gender specific areas, nothing that is about color and race. It speaks about how you as an individual get your life together by following the three basic outlines, and that is activate; and after you have activated, execute; and after execution, then you accelerate to do more than what you consider the possibility of you being able to do as an individual.

Rev. FLAKE: That's correct.

Rev. FLAKE: Thank you for allowing me to come.