- Call me a softie, but I'm rooting for Martha Stewart
to beat the stock fraud rap. I hate to see a creative genius and an accomplished
businesswoman go down because of, at worst, a stupid mistake that pales
beside the exploits of some of her male corporate cohorts.
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- In full disclosure, Martha Stewart and I go way back.
Whoops. I mean Martha Kostyra. That was her name when she was my neighbor
and schoolmate in Nutley, N.J., in the 1950s. I used to admire her from
afar as she walked up our street, Elm Place, to catch the New York bus.
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- I don't mean to imply that we were friends. Even though
we lived on the same street and attended Nutley High School together, I
was never part of Martha's social scene. I was a mere freshman when she
was a senior, an unbridgeable coolness gap. Besides, I didn't have the
faintest idea back then how to make canapes or bechamel sauce. My idea
of decorating was sticking a few snapshots of teen idols like Ricky Nelson
on the mirror in my bedroom, which usually was carpeted with dirty laundry
and movie magazines.
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- No doubt Martha's room in the modest house down the street
was more stylish, although I never was invited to see it. Martha had the
aura of someone special even then. She carried herself with a regal air
that made her unapproachable.
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- She would walk past my house, her blond hair matching
her neatly buttoned camel hair coat, the kind with a belt in the back.
I would no more have yelled "Hey, Martha!" than worn last year's
fashions.
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- I wouldn't have dared face rejection. She seemed so aloof
and sophisticated. While I worked after school slinging hash at the local
burger joint, she was modeling in the glamour capital across the Hudson
for spending money. I couldn't imagine dishing with her about the latest
Elvis single or who she was going to ask to the "Twirp Dance,"
our high school's annual chance for girls to assert themselves by getting
their own dates.
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- For the record, I never saw Martha at one of those dances.
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- I have written to her once since she's become famous.
A few years ago, I read her magazine column about her high school reunion
and was amazed when she mentioned that Mr. Gutknecht had attended. He was
a chemistry teacher at NHS. We used to call him The Thermometer because
he was bald and always wore a red tie. I was so excited by this blast from
the past that I e-mailed Martha spontaneously to thank her for the memories.
She never wrote back.
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- This, of course, was inconsistent with her advice on
thank-you notes but in keeping with her reputation as Diva Dearest, a cold
cookie with a superior attitude. That's one reason why many people would
love to see her empire topple. But I don't hold it against her. I have
a hard enough time answering my mail, and I'm not a multi-media mogul.
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- Whatever she has done, it is not enough to justify a
yearlong investigation by three federal agencies, nor the public scorn
being thrown at her. As far as I can figure from news coverage, her big
crime, besides being perfect, is protesting her innocence and thus potentially
influencing her company's stock prices. Makes you wonder what a media-circus
trial will do.
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- Look, Martha never claimed to be Joan of Arc. She simply
used her artistic competence and her head for business to figure out exactly
what the American consumer needed. She offered advice on how to create
an idyllic domestic environment at a time when home was looming large as
a sanctuary from the fast-paced world so far from the Nutley, N.J., of
the 1950s.
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- For that, she is being compared to O.J. Simpson?
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- Where was the outrage when Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and
Dennis Kozlowski, to name a few of the corporate sharks who left human
wreckage in their wake, bilked employees and stockholders out of billions
for personal greed? If Martha is guilty of lying about why she sold her
ImClone stock (to make a relatively puny personal profit), she hurt herself
more than anyone. The woman might have netted about $50,000 on the deal,
hardly the equivalent of raiding pension funds and rendering the 401(k)s
of hard-working Americans worthless.
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- Free Martha.
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- Perch is an editorial writer for The Hartford Courant
who went to high school with Martha Stewart in Nutley, N.J.
- http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/2374040
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