The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here

My sainted Presbyterian mother once said to me when I was in high school that she couldn’t understand how I could get an A plus on my report card for English and a D minus for arithmetic. For me it was easy. I am a word person and arithmetic is based on numbers, not words.

The numeral system was invented by the Hindus and copied by the Arabs who brought it to Europe in the 12th century. It is even referred to as the Arabic numerals. I could have probably survived dealing with this method, but then in the 16th century some smart aleck stuck in the decimal point and then came fractions and percentages and all those other nonverbal complications.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am totally illiterate when it comes to math. I love solving written math problems and never had difficulty knowing that if I had four apples and my neighbor gave me three, I’d have a total of seven.

I could even use division in written problems and if asked to divide 18 apples among six people, I’d know to give three to each one.

But start stacking numbers on numbers and I’m a D- student.

I use math every day but only by using logic not by stacking numbers then fractionalizing them. Once in my newspaper career by using logic and common sense, I discovered a $5 million error in a Los Angeles tax payer financed project that the smartest county engineers had overlooked. The revelation set off a scandal and sent the entire project back to the drawing board.

I wish I had had Janet Magedanz as my math teacher. She would probably discovered an Einstein with a Scottish surname. Janet is a Certified Public Accountant in Corvallis, Oregon. 

This past weekend at Oregon State University I took one of her math classes at an all day seminar on Financial Stewardship for Nonprofit Organization Board Training. I am a board member of a nonprofit organization.

Janet is my kind of teacher. The title of her seminar was "Everything You Want to Know About Financial Statements But Are Afraid to Ask."

Her lecture was totally visual. Janet, herself a confessed gardener, used a garden club’s financial statement to get the attention of her class. Oh, she had spreadsheets all right, but she acted them out with four garden buckets to explain the financial statement of the WORMY Garden Club to which Paula Pullweed had been elected treasurer. She even put on her straw gardening hat to brighten the demonstration.

The four garden buckets represented Cash, Temporarily Restricted Funds, Restricted Funds and Expenses. The tin buckets sounded loudly as she dropped in coins to illustrate the money coming in and where the money went from the time Paula took over the job and reconciled the club’s bank account.

To illustrate restricted funds, she had Harriet Handtrowel donate a greenhouse to the club, with the restriction that if the club dissolved the greenhouse would be sold and the money it generated donated to the Oregon Gardens at Silverton.

She had restricted portions of the club dues for contribution to the national garden club organization. She had a grant from the national organization to the club for $10,000 restricted to landscaping work at Ft. Clatsop National Park in Astoria.

She included a provision for recording seed sales by the club under income and offset the profit with an expense column for buying the packets used to package the seeds.

Janet is a senior managing partner of one of the largest CPA firms in Corvallis, but admittedly she is a gardener and that is probably why she is so down to earth in her teaching methods.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)