Unlike other public officials, city managers were originally conceived as the centerpiece of a normative reform theory or "model" for restructuring and redirecting the very purposes of local government. Thus,the manager's occupation was at its very inception deeply enmeshed within a peculiar frame of political values that was the handiwork, not of a seasoned public official nor profound political thinker, but of a relatively obscureNew York City businessman, twenty-eight- year-old Richard S. Childs, who pursued a part-time hobby of municipal reform. Shortly after graduating from Yale College, Childs in 1904 with another prominent Progressive of that day Woodrow Wilson, set out to rid cities of boss rule by promoting the "short ballot" idea, which sought to improve and rationalize voting processes through shortened ballots. He later was attracted for similar reasons to "the commission plan," first popularized in Galveston, Texas, but in 1909 his eye fell accidentally on an experiment in Staunton, Virginia, that had recently hired a manager" as chief full-time a From his one-room New York City short ballot office, Childs soon produced a steady stream of anonymous articles and stories praising the virtues of city manager government as superior to the commission plan (giving the mistaken impression that the manager plan was already in widespread operation). Childs wielded a power- ful pen that made him a virtuoso at publicizing manager government. News editorials a after dinner speakers soon were catch-phrases that became trade programs of the repeating his Progressive municipal reformers. By 1918. one hundred cities, one as large as Dayton, Ohio, had adopted "the manager plan." Ironically, while all this occurred, the man who claimed to be "the plan's inventor" remained so that no one had ever heard of him at the first meeting of city managers doubt few managers