Martinsville Bulletin, Inc.
P. O. Box 3711
204 Broad Street
Martinsville, Virginia 24115
276-638-8801
Toll Free: 800-234-6575
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Kent Mathewson |
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
By MICKEY POWELL - Bulletin Staff Writer
As Martinsville’s first city manager, Kent Mathewson helped modernize the city and its government, according to former longtime city officials.
Mathewson, who managed the city from 1949 to 1956, was 90 when he died Monday in Advance, N.C., where he lived during retirement. His health had declined rapidly in recent weeks, said his son, Worth Mathewson.
“He was well-respected and well thought of ... and you never saw a nicer fellow,” said Holladay Yeaman, who was the city’s finance director while Mathewson was city manager. They have remained close friends.
Tom Noland, who was Martinsville’s third city manager from 1966 to 1980, also knew Mathewson. He said Mathewson was “very outgoing” and “used his education well” in setting up the council-manager form of government locally.
He “did a wonderful job” in Martinsville, Yeaman said.
Mathewson came to Martinsville near the end of a decade in which the city’s population grew more than 62 percent to about 20,000.
At the time, having a hired, professional manager overseeing the day-to-day operations of city government on behalf of an elected city council was a fairly new concept in some places, Yeaman and Noland indicated.
A native of Long Island, N.Y., Mathewson graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1939. He was the university’s first student to receive a bachelor’s degree in public administration, which included studies in civil engineering, business administration and law.
“Government was a new field” of study for colleges and universities back then, Yeaman recalled.
Mathewson worked in San Diego, Calif., and Asheboro, N.C., before coming to Martinsville. He worked in many communities over the years.
But “I honestly think he was the happiest in Martinsville,” Worth Mathewson said, mentioning he also lived in the city while his father was its manager. At the time, Martinsville was “a really progressive town ... with a wealth of bright, really motivated people” who made his father’s job worthwhile.
Mathewson also enjoyed the area’s hunting and fishing opportunities and made friends locally who also enjoyed those sports, his son said.
One thing for which Mathewson is remembered in Martinsville is converting Church and Main streets uptown into one-way streets. In a 2001 interview with the Martinsville Bulletin, he humorously recalled that the conversion was meant to alleviate traffic congestion, but for a while it actually increased the congestion. People from throughout Martinsville, Henry and Patrick counties came uptown to see what was then a new transportation concept.
Although no wrecks occurred, “you have never seen such a traffic jam in your life,” Mathewson chuckled. “It was so many people. It was so jammed that nobody could move!”
Mathewson considered his greatest achievement in Martinsville to be helping establish a Mayor’s Commission on Human Values in the 1950s. Commission suggestions led to expansions of public schools and cultural activities, plus the hiring of a full-time city recreation director and the development of a public library, court, police department and new jail.
His other accomplishments included helping to get Memorial Boulevard built and reorganizing the Martinsville Fire Department, whose paid firefighters are now supplemented by a volunteer force.
However, he feared losing his job after he came up with a controversial idea in 1949 to eliminate most paid firefighters and replace them with volunteers, he indicated during a 1980 interview.
In 1951, a warehouse fire uptown did $600,000 in damages to businesses and warehouses and threatened to engulf the district. But the wind suddenly changed direction and helped the responding firefighters — most of whom were volunteers — keep the fire from spreading, Mathewson recalled.
Had the fire spread, he told the Bulletin in 1980, “I would have been ridden out of town on a rail because I was the guy who came in here and set up the volunteer fire company.” Instead he received a lot of praise.
Mathewson earned $9,000 annually as Martinsville’s city manager. He left Martinsville to be city manager in Salem, Ore., where he earned $14,000 annually.
He later headed the Metropolitan Fund in Detroit, where he helped local and state officials and business leaders try and solve metropolitan problems. He then taught at a university in Texas before retiring in North Carolina.
In Advance, he founded the Davie County Foundation, which raised funds to start a community college and keep a financially strapped local hospital from closing, among other accomplishments.
Mathewson related his experiences in Martinsville and other places in a 2001 biography, “Keeper of the Flame” by Lynn W. Hall.
He received a lifetime achievement award of the same title the previous year from the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society for Public Administration.
He once told the Bulletin that having lived and worked in places large and small, he realized that “human beings are human beings” no matter where they live, and city officials must strive to fulfill their unique needs.
A good city manager, Mathewson said, has “lots of energy and dedication” toward his or her job. Also, the person must “be highly motivated in terms of human relations and serve every resident,” not just a chosen few.
“Dad had a tremendous drive (and) a goal in life to get things done,” Worth Mathewson said. “Everything he did, he did it as far as he could (physically) go,” which is what made his father a good city manager, he added.
Funeral arrangements were not complete on Tuesday. |
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