NH charity busted by feds for helping teens become entrepreneurs

[Fluff and Stuff]

I said laws are not supposed to be blindly enforced

I 100% disagree with you.  All laws must always be enforced to the fullest extend possible.  We are a nation of laws.

[FTL_Ian]

Sarcasm doesn't come through the internet too well.  Did I detect a bit there, TN?

[Fluff and Stuff]

Sarcasm doesn't come through the internet too well.  Did I detect a bit there, TN?

No.  If a law is not always completely enforced it is evil to create it.  If a law is bad; it must be repealed, not selectively enforced. 

All laws currently on the books must be enforced to the maximum amount, IMHO.

[tracysaboe]

This should definitely be something in the next issue of the Keen Free Press.

What do you think Russle?

Tracy

[Fluff and Stuff]

This should definitely be something in the next issue of the Keen Free Press.

What do you think Russle?

Tracy

Tracy, try calling him Russell.  Just think of him as somone that sells rus.

[Pat McCotter]

This should definitely be something in the next issue of the Keen Free Press.

What do you think Russle?

Tracy

Tracy, try calling him Russell.  Just think of him as somone that sells rus.

Russell! I didn't know you owned Russia! I'll give you some silver for the oil fields!

Oh, wait! Didn't you get busted for selling a bridge once!

[KBCraig]

I said laws are not supposed to be blindly enforced

I 100% disagree with you.  All laws must always be enforced to the fullest extend possible.  We are a nation of laws.

I understand what you're saying: if a law, fully and equally enforced, produces an unjust result, then the law is evil. Rather that creating exceptions, the law itself must be eliminated.

Kevin

[JonM]

I've always thought one of the most offensive police vehicles I've ever seen is an SUV with SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT written on it in huge letters.

[Dave Ridley]

<<All laws must always be enforced to the fullest extend possible.  We are a nation of laws.>>

If you really believe that you should read "footfall" by Larry Niven...a  sci fi novel about a race of aliens that try to take over the earth with the goal of making its inhabitants live stricly by whatever laws they have made for themselves.   As you can imagine that would be an utter disaster, and in the novel the people of earth have enough common sense to fight to the death rather than live with strict enforcement of all their own laws.

[Fluff and Stuff]

<<All laws must always be enforced to the fullest extend possible.  We are a nation of laws.>>

If you really believe that you should read "footfall" by Larry Niven...a  sci fi novel about a race of aliens that try to take over the earth with the goal of making its inhabitants live stricly by whatever laws they have made for themselves.   As you can imagine that would be an utter disaster, and in the novel the people of earth have enough common sense to fight to the death rather than live with strict enforcement of all their own laws.

I don't read sci fi and I am not against a revolution.  If that is what the people want; I say live and let live.

[intergraph19]

I don't read sci fi and I am not against a revolution.  If that is what the people want; I say live and let live.

Or in the case of revolution, kill or let kill?

[Fluff and Stuff]

I don't read sci fi and I am not against a revolution.  If that is what the people want; I say live and let live.

Or in the case of revolution, kill or let kill?

I was refering to the French Revolution

Besides, you know how to use a gun, right  ^_^
I'll let you borrow mine, I don't think I even need one

Actually, it seems like someone dies everyday, where I live.  Plus, I am the Army.  Death is not something that bothers me.

[Dave Ridley]

Got a call back from Alex Ray today saying thanks for the support.  Like Keith he doesn't seem to see a need for a demonstration.

I still have not heard back from the Labor dept bureaucrat I complained to.

[Fluff and Stuff]

Got a call back from Alex Ray today saying thanks for the support.  Like big butt he doesn't seem to see a need for a demonstration.

I look at it like this.  Most pro-freedom people live busy lives and don't have time to go to many protests.  The larger  and better planned a protest is, the more likely the media will cover it.  Given those factors, it is a good to have few but good protests.  7 protests a year (with only a few 100 freedom activists in NH) may do more for freedom than 12 protests a year.

I am not saying protests are bad 

[Pat McCotter]

His next goal: Giving back 
Common Man owner aims to help others 
By LAUREN R. DORGAN
Monitor staff
June 03. 2006 9:30AM

Not feeling particularly Christmasy last December, Alex Ray put $30,000 in his pocket and hopped on a plane to New Orleans. There, he found people whose lives had been devastatedby Hurricane Katrina and "gave them a couple grand apiece," he said.

Ray, the owner of the Common Man restaurants, explained his method in his online diary.

"I brought a wad of dough (felt like a drug runner at Logan Airport), as it occurred to me that no banks would be open for three days, and what confidence would a NH check be to a person, handed over by a scraggly guy like me on a holiday weekend?" he wrote. "Cash is cash the world around, like salt was way back when."

When he's not on a mission to give away money, Ray spends most of his days traveling up and down Interstate 93, visiting his 13 restaurants across New Hampshire, including the Common Man in Concord and the Tilt'n Diner in Tilton.

Wrinkled and cowlicked, Ray is a 61-year-old man with the gee-whiz spark of a boy - describing Ray's insatiable curiosity, one friend calls him a "perpetual adolescent." But the ink stains on his shirt belie his perfectionism. On a recent visit to the Lake House in Meredith, he jumped up on a chair to fix a curtain and got down on his knees to examine spots on the carpet.

All this effort is not aimed at fattening his wallet, Ray said.

"I've already made the money I need to make," he explained. "We want to be a company that doesn't make money for shareholders, stakeholders, Wall Street or Alex Ray."
After 40 years, Ray said, he's tired of the restaurant business, but he doesn't want to sell off the Common Man. Instead, he wants to turn the business into a not-for-profit venture. (He doesn't want official nonprofit status, he said, because that comes with too many rules.) He sees himself as the Common Man's "guru guy," doing good works and keeping employees "proud and happy."

For a man who flies across the country to give out $30,000, Ray is thrifty. He has the New York Times delivered a week late at a cut-rate and likes to drive used cars.

Ray quotes Groucho Marx and has been known to write e-mails in rhyming couplets. He doesn't have a secretary and carries around a heap of paper scraps, saying his world is as organized "as a bowl of spaghetti." People write him e-mails all the time asking for help, he said, and he personally responds.

Like any guru, Ray occasionally speaks in aphorisms. Perhaps the most fitting for Ray is the one he attributes to his father, a jack-of-all-trades who died at 94.

"My dad always said, 'I'd rather wear out than rust out,'" Ray said.

So much to do

Katrina relief is at the top of Ray's list. Since the hurricane struck in August, Ray has visited the Gulf Coast three times, doing everything from rescuing pets to cooking meals for evacuees. His restaurants have held fundraisers and donated tens of thousands to the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity. In April, Ray drove 1,700 miles to Alexandria, La., towing a trailer full of supplies donated by New Hampshire police departments.

Ray also has a lot cooking close to home. During last month's floods in New Hampshire, he fed evacuees and rescuers around the state. He instructs advocacy groups on how to get restaurant owners to go smoke-free. He encourages the managers of his restaurants to host fundraisers for local causes as they see fit. He's also got a passion for fixing up historic buildings and has turned several into Common Man restaurants.

Ask anyone in New Hampshire's nonprofit world about Ray and they'll use phrases like "genius"and "bulldog" to describe a man who fixes on an idea and makes it happen. Colin Cabot of Loudon, who's working with Ray on a historic preservation project, said he's not convinced Ray ever sleeps.

"His hands are even more beat up than mine, and I don't know how he does that," said Cabot, who rehabilitates old buildings.

Priscilla Greene, the executive director of Concord's Red Cross, said that she's done nonprofit work for 30 years in five states and she's never met anyone like Ray.

"He's in his own class," Greene said.

One of Ray's biggest proposals yet is in Franklin, where he's talking about pouring $4 million into restoring several of the historic buildings on the Daniel Webster Farm. He envisions three interconnected uses of the space: a 30-day treatment program for recovering alcoholics and drug users, six-month transitional housing for those still in recovery and a hospitality school whose students would help run the food-and-housing side of the other two programs.

A recovering alcoholic himself, Ray said that he's been able to find places where he can get help, but he knows few facilities affordable to the average family. He aims to fill that gap.

Judge Ed Kelly, chief of the state's district courts, said that every day courts see children and adults with substance problems and nowhere to go.

Kelly, who has seen Ray's work with a number of charities around Plymouth, calls the restaurateur "energy personified."

"All my memories of Alex are of someone who's just itching to get going and to get something done,"he said. "I would describe Alex as someone who understands from a very central place in his being the struggles that people have in life and someone who wants to do something to help people."

Last summer, working with a Plymouth group called Communities for Alcohol and Drug-Free Youth, Ray allowed a dozen teenagers to run their own breakfast caf? out of the Common Man Inn in Plymouth. In addition to donating space and supplies, Ray personally trained the teens, according to the group's executive director, Debbie Naro.

The program got into trouble this winter with the Department of Labor because some kids under the age of 16 were coming in to work before 7 a.m., a violation of labor laws. Ray paid a $2,000 fine.

"Alex was like the knight in shining armor; he came in and cleaned up the mess for all of us," Naro said.

The run-in with the feds was frustrating, Ray said - he doesn't think this is the kind of thing tax dollars should be used to enforce -but it hasn't deterred him. This year, the breakfast caf? will be back, and Ray will set up an ice cream stand for the teens to run.

An unlikely beginning

Alex Ray was born in New Jersey in 1945 and spent his early years living in a gated community called Lake Valhalla. His father, Lewis, was an entrepreneur in the vending machine business who achieved what Ray describes as his neighborhood's highest value: the three-car garage.

"They thought that's what it was about," Ray said.

In 1959, when Ray was 14, his family chucked it all and moved to New Hampshire, buying a farmhouse with almost no electricity or running water. The family bought a 69-acre farm in South Conway for $6,900, Ray remembers.

As a teenager, Ray cooked at the Cranmore ski resort. But whenever people ask Ray how he got into the restaurant business, he answers "by default."

"I was a classic high school failure," he said. "It took me four years to get by Algebra I."

In 1965, Ray married and had a daughter. He enrolled in culinary school in New Haven - he calls it his "only choice"- and took a job in the management program of the Canteen Corp., which specializes in vending machines.

Ray excelled at Canteen, racking in the awards. So he was surprised, he recalls, when a senior executive took him aside and gave him some advice.

"He said, 'You're not corporate material.' And he was absolutely right: I'm rebellious. I'm a loner."

A year later, he quit and came back to New Hampshire.

Ray rented a tiny motel with a breakfast nook in Holderness, got rid of the rooms, and ran that as a restaurant in the summer.

In 1970, not long after the birth of his second daughter, Ray bought a house in Ashland, moved in the top floor and built a small restaurant in the first floor.

He named it the Common Man. "I wanted to appeal to everyone from a carpenter to a banker."

Ray and his wife divorced in 1980. For about 25 years, Ray has had a "significant other" in Diane Downing, a Common Man executive who does the "softer side" of the business, he said.

Fifteen years passed before the next Common Man opened in Lincoln in 1986. Since then, Ray has opened 11 more restaurants, many of them in renovated farmhouses, barns and mills.

He has two more locations in the works, one in Claremont - which, he said, is a city on the way up -and another in an as-yet-undisclosed location.

Today, the chain is so big that it has a construction team to lead building projects, a commissary to make ice cream and cut steaks and a company store to sell its products. Ray said he sometimes struggles with the size of his business.

"Unfortunately, I left the corporate world and now I am one," he said. "How do you run a 750-employee company and not be to them what I left?"

As a boss, Ray said he has rough edges and can be tough to work for - he'll drop in to a restaurant for an hour, reel off a list of improvements and then be off to the next place. But he likes to keep an eye out for employees, making small loans or giving raises if he thinks they're needed, he said. The company offers health insurance to wait staff, along with perks such as a community service day, for employees to use as they choose.

"I'm not good about backslapping, and that's the reality of me,"he said. "But I am good at taking care of them. . . .When your people are proud, it's just good business."