Managing in the Center of the Storm : Little Riles Tom Liegler, Boss of S.D.’s Convention Headquarters

Unless you knew better, you’d swear that Tom Liegler was responsible for soft puppies, Christmas and baseball.

After 25 minutes of conversation, you may begin to wonder whether maybe you aren’t caught in a time warp, when life was kinder and gentler. The talented, affable and low-key Liegler just seems too good to be true.

San Diego’s 61-year-old convention center manager is a success by any definition of the word.

Liegler’s employers love him, his employees swear by him, he’s made a good living, and, no matter how hard you look, you can’t find a Liegler enemy.

All this in the rough-and-tumble world of multimillion-dollar business and local politics.

Ask Liegler about this love fest, and he will change the subject, saying he is just a small fish. Then he’ll quote Vince Lombardi on teamwork.

That’s the way Liegler talks. His dialogue sounds the way a Saturday Evening Post cover looks.

“Service is just the rent we pay for our room on this Earth” is a typical Lieglerism.

Liegler shops through the collected wisdom of the ages and pulls out what he thinks he can use. He winds up sounding like a cross between Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Donna Reed show. He quotes Walt Disney, Cicero, Goethe, Shakespeare and, of course, Lombardi.

His frequent analogies to sports come naturally. Sports have been a big part of Liegler’s life since his days growing up in Racine, Wis., the son of a former professional football player-turned-insurance man.

Young Liegler dreamed of doing for Racine what the great Otto Graham did for Waukegan, Ill.

“I wanted to be just like him,” recalled Liegler in a recent interview. “I wanted to play baseball for the White Sox, football for the Green Bay Packers and basketball for the Oshkosh All Stars.”

Although Liegler played several sports at Iowa’s Grinnell College, he realized that, no matter how good the genetics or the desire, professional sports were beyond his reach. He turned to his studies.

Liegler majored in euthenics at Grinnell. That’s the study of human improvement through environment. Liegler figured he would start bettering human environment at Chicago’s Comiskey Park when he left his July, 1950, graduation and drove to Chicago. The next morning, he started work as a coordinator for the 1950 baseball All-Star Game.

Charlie Comiskey, owner of the White Sox and Comiskey Park, noticed Liegler and offered him a permanent job as his special assistant. Liegler gives the job description as “errand boy.”

“I did not mind that, as long as it was with the Chicago White Sox,” Liegler said. “The most rewarding thing for me was when Mr. Comiskey had cards printed up that said ‘Tom Liegler,’ not errand boy, but ‘administrative assistant for the Chicago White Sox.’ ”

The Sox shuffled Liegler through a variety of positions. He took on each role like a good utility infielder. He even spent his honeymoon setting up spring training camp in Florida.

“She knew my job through our courtship,” he said in explaining the reaction of his wife, Joyce. “It was always work with the Chicago White Sox, and the courtship was just part of that.”

Then Comiskey called.

“He said ‘Tom, how is the honeymoon?’ ” Liegler said, laughing. “I said it was very wonderful. It was a warm February in Hollywood, Fla. He said ‘Well, Tom, I’d like you to get on a plane to Waterloo, Iowa, for a press conference at 9 o’clock tomorrow.’ I said ‘Charlie, I’m on my honeymoon!’ He said, ‘Well, we’ve just announced you as the general manager of the Waterloo Whitehawks.’ I went back to my wife and said, ‘Joyce, you’re going to love it in Waterloo, Iowa.’ ”

When he was boss of the Sox Class B farm team, Liegler and his wife did everything from sign contracts to clean out concessions. In the off season, he helped the city of Waterloo run its Hippodrome, the site of the Cattle Congress, a gathering of cattlemen from all over the region. It was his introduction to convention-center management.

If you are a traditionalist, 1962 was a bad year for baseball. It was expansion time in the National League.

Houston Judge Roy Hofheinz had told Major League Baseball that he would build a domed stadium if the city could have a franchise. The team was there; now he had to come up with a building.

New Houston General Manager Carl Richards, formerly with the Sox, called on Liegler. He worked with architects and builders. When the grass refused to grow fast enough, he worked with chemical companies until Monsanto came up with Astroturf.

The Astrodome opened in 1965. One year later, Liegler was hired by the city of Anaheim to help design and build the Anaheim Stadium and Convention Center. While at Anaheim, he also managed the city’s two golf courses.

When the San Diego Convention Center board got around to looking for a manager for its planned building, it interviewed Liegler and liked what it saw. His pay, now $100,000 a year, started July 1, 1985. Eager to get on the job, he started a month earlier--without pay.

Most observers credit the center’s opening to Liegler and the staff he put together “like a coach puts together a winning team.” He coaxed the construction and nursed the building through its birth pangs.

It has not been an easy road. Liegler works for the city of San Diego. But he also works for a quasi-public agency, the San Diego Convention Center board of directors. The San Diego Unified Port District owns the building and paid for its construction. The port commissioners lease the building back to the city for a dollar a year.

“If there is a tougher environment in which to manage, I can’t think of it,” said Anaheim City Manager Bob Simpson.

Liegler, who can appear almost bizarrely optimistic, acknowledges some frustrations, but his low-key style helped him win friends among local politicians.

“We can’t all be famous. Somebody has got to sit on the curb and clap as the famous people drive by, and that is the role we play,” he said. “We play that role to make the board of directors and the City Council and the Port District and the trustees take credit for the work they have done in the past. They make the work, we just carry out their direction.”

According to Simpson, this attitude has served Liegler well.

“If he left any enemies in Anaheim, I do not know who they are.”

But Simpson and others say the real secret behind Liegler’s success is his talent. Liegler was responsible for Anaheim building a center twice the size a study recommended. The center is now in its third expansion. Decisions like that have led some to label Liegler a “visionary.”

Word about Liegler spread to other cities building public facilities, and he was soon earning extra money as a consultant on projects from the Louisiana Superdome to Australia’s Sydney Entertainment Centre.

“Tom has been around the business 40 years,” said Carroll Armstrong, marketing director for the San Diego center. “He is well-respected by all his peers.”

Several of his employees credit Liegler directly for the center opening when it did. They all claimed he is difficult to work for, but they love working for him just the same.

“At times, he pushes us beyond where we think we can go, but the result is always better than we expected we could do,” said Donna Alm, press spokeswoman for the center.

His orders even extend to employee vacations. Whenever a staff member goes anywhere, he or she is supposed to visit the public facility in that town. On one side of an index card, they are to write how that facility is better than San Diego’s and on the other side how San Diego’s is better.

“That’s true,” Alm said. “When I went on vacation, I had to visit the Casper Event Center in Casper, Wyo.”

Liegler manages the way he does because he believes there are lessons to be learned from life. All of his lessons seem to have come from a McGuffey Reader.

He concedes being an anachronism. He still uses the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule as his guides for life. He claims he is just an aw-shucks guy:

“I am still Tommy Liegler, Midwest, basic, honest, committed, simple.”

Indeed, the pictures in his small office include one of the San Diego center, one of Ronald Reagan standing in Anaheim Stadium with the American flag in the background, and one of his son sitting with the immortal baseball manager Casey Stengel. His only personal adornment is a 1959 World Series ring obtained when the Sox lost to the Dodgers.

Liegler’s mythologizing and quoting bits of wisdom has struck some San Diego leaders as a little corny, but the criticism seems to be more over style than substance. According to Carroll, Liegler’s attitude works.

“He is from the old school,” Carroll said. “This makes him unique. He works real hard to be modern but does not appear to sacrifice the basic values and principles that have worked and been proven true after being tried over and over again.”

“He describes himself as a poor Wisconsin farm boy,” Simpson said. “Let’s just say that I would rather have him negotiating for me than against me. I don’t think it is an act at all. He is a genuinely nice man.”