The following was submitted by Sheila Loftus in response to the recent press release from the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association:
As the longtime editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly magazine, I prided myself on getting my facts right. I usually succeeded. When I didn’t, I let my readers know where I’d gone wrong.
The recent press release from the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association (WMABA) doesn’t have the narrative right. For the sake of the truth, I will set the record straight.
(Note: This press release was dated and published on ABRN’s and CollisionWeek’s Web sites August 11, 2006. WMABA also e-mailed it to WMABA members whose emails were on its list; however, those without emails listed didn’t receive the press release.)
Background: Until last month, I was the editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly, the magazine of the WMABA. And until I was dismissed by the WMABA’s board of directors, I was the WMABA’s executive director. (Technically, I hold the title until the end of August.). I was at the helm of Hammer and Dolly for more than three decades. My tenure as executive director of the WMABA was nearly as long.
The WMABA press release said I had “resigned” my position at Hammer and Dolly. This is preposterous. Eighteen months ago, I told the WMABA board that the magazine was struggling financially. I asked for the board’s help getting advertisers. (Since board members purchase products of potential advertisers, they’re presumably in a position to influence who places an ad. In the past, board members, recognizing Hammer and Dolly’s value to the association, have been influential in keeping the magazine going, especially in lean years.) The current board was, to put it gently, lukewarm to the idea of assisting Hammer and Dolly.
Hammer and Dolly had a unique mission in the collision repair industry. It strove to cover the top stories in the country-indeed, the world-while at the same time publicizing news great and small about WMABA members and their families and friends. It was as if Time magazine, while covering presidents and Popes, also included stories every week about farm families in Des Moines.
But even though Hammer and Dolly made the WMABA a world-renowned organization, the current WMABA board didn’t think it was worth supporting. One board member claimed Hammer and Dolly was worthless, in large part because it didn’t print nice stories about the insurance industry. While I pointed out that this wasn’t true-Hammer and Dolly was fair about praising insurers when praise was due-I also offered the board member the chance to write something positive about the insurance industry for the pages of Hammer and Dolly. His reply? “I never read Hammer and Dolly.”
Another board member asked rhetorically, “What value does Hammer and Dolly provide WMABA members?”
To pick only one of a hundred or more benefits: A member of the WMABA who steps into any collision-repair meeting or insurance-company gathering around the country-and even around the world-could be sure to receive immediate recognition and respect because of his or her connection to Hammer and Dolly. I’ve seen it happen. Such a reception, as the commercial says, is priceless.
And don’t forget who devoured the pages of Hammer and Dolly even more eagerly than collision repairers: the insurance industry. Insurers have told me off the record that they feared Hammer and Dolly because Hammer and Dolly told the truth.
But convincing some board members of this-especially board members who didn’t actually read the magazine-was like teaching fish to tap dance.
In the end, I was keeping Hammer and Dolly afloat with my personal resources.
When I learned that the WMABA board planned to create two distinct positions, one as editor/publisher of Hammer and Dolly, the other as the executive director of the WMABA, and that it was going to cut me out of the executive director’s job, I knew I was being offered a short route to bankruptcy.
Let me be clear: I didn’t resign from Hammer and Dolly. Members of the current WMABA board killed it.
And while the WMABA press release tiptoes around this issue, I’ll say it plainly: I was fired as executive director of the WMABA.
At a meeting on June 7, 2006-a meeting from which I was excluded-the WMABA board voted not to renew my contract. I was not told of the board’s decision until August 4, via certified letter. In the meantime, WMABA president Torchy Chandler of Chandler’s Auto Body in Beltsville and Columbia, Md., summoned me to a meeting on July 14. Also in attendance were WMABA’s vice president, secretary, and treasurer.
Although the board had made its decision to terminate my contract five weeks prior to the meeting, Torchy and the other officers put to me such questions as, “Do you consider yourself a prima donna?” and “Do you think you can work with the current WMABA board of directors?” In retrospect, it’s obvious they wanted me, under the weight of their often self-evident and frequently unprofessional questions, to do their work for them-they wanted me to quit.
To have walked away from a job I’ve held, and loved, for nearly half my life after such a mean-spirited and, given the decision the board had already made, superfluous inquisition would have been to insult all I’ve tried to do for the association and the industry. In columns in Hammer and Dolly and in my work with WMABA, I have always urged collision repairers to stand their ground, to value their excellent work, to resist caving in to arbitrary pressure. I could do no less.
Perhaps there is some honor in being dismissed by a group of people who would rather see the pages of Hammer and Dolly filled with Valentines to insurance companies rather than honest stories about the challenges facing collision repairers. Maybe one of the reasons for my dismissal as the WMABA’s executive director is so that the job could be given to the girlfriend of one of the WMABA’s officers. That officer is in charge of re-writing what is now being called an employment contract. That officer’s girlfriend is, at the moment I’m writing this, the only person to have applied for the job.
I am outraged on behalf of the members of the WMABA, who have entrusted their organization to insurance company apologists and people who evidently think nepotism and conflict of interest are their prerogatives.
I believe in this industry. But I believe this industry must help itself by exposing the truth rather than ignoring or sugarcoating it; by working for the greater good rather than the enrichment of the self-proclaimed elite; and by treating other industries as participants in the repair process, but not as partners.
While I’ve been stripped of part of my arsenal to communicate with and fight for this industry, I have not quit it. Far from it. I am continuing to publish the weekly news e-mail/fax the CRASH Network (www.crashnetwork.com), which I launched in 1996.
I care as much about the collision repair industry as ever, and I intend to keep working to ensure a better future for every hard-working man and woman who gives their honest best to it.
Sheila Loftus