Going Against the Grain: Charles Pillsbury ('75)

At a St. Paul, Minnesota prep school he was known as “the Doone” –– slang for “the guy who’s not afraid to appear foolish.” At Yale, his college roommate Garry Trudeau worked his nickname, his bespectacled visage, and his whimsical, “lefty” personality into one of the most famous comic strip characters of all times, Mike Doonsebury. But all of this has been icing on the cake –– or should we say, frosting on the crescent buns –– for Charlie Pillsbury. As the namesake of Charles Alfred who founded one of the world’s largest grain and flour companies, Pillsbury has possessed a brand name all of his own.

For the great-grandson of one of Minnesota’s most impressive industrialists, that name has been a marker not so much for poppin’ fresh dough, but rather for public service. “My great-grand uncle was Minnesota’s third governor, my uncle ran for that office and my father was a New Hampshire senator in the 1970s,” Pillsbury explains matter-of-factly. What galvanized Pillsbury’s own political sentiments, however, was the year he spent after high school in France in the late 1960s, absorbing alternative viewpoints on the meaning of world military engagements in Southeast Asia.

Pillsbury came back to the United States a “liberal European” who had almost nothing in common with his old high school friends –– or his Republican family. “It wasn’t a rebellion, and I never stopped loving them, it was just my creative response to what was going on in the world,” he says. Pillsbury became actively involved in the presidential campaign of Democrat Eugene McCarthy –– while his own right-wing father was running for the Senate. He also became one of the first to engage in shareholder activism, “raising hell” at board meetings about companies’ involvement in weapons manufacturing during the Vietnam War, and even taking Honeywell all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court to push for disclosure of their records on cluster bomb production.

Pillsbury at work in his New Haven office.

“That’s what got me interested in law,” says Pillsbury, who applied to BU Law School in 1972. “I wanted to do what Ralph Nader did –– public interest law.” At BU, he took courses in corporate, tax and finance law and found a mentor in Professor Philip Blumberg, who also was interested in shareholder activism. “My case with Honeywell was actually a footnote in one of our readings,” he says with a laugh. In his third year, Pillsbury wrote for a BU Law journal one of the first articles on employee stock ownership plans. “I was a capitalist but wanted to turn capitalism on its head,” he says.

After graduating, Pillsbury worked in tax law. “I envisioned myself as a kind of ‘public interest’ tax lawyer, which is really an oxymoron,” he reflects wryly. He then worked solo for ten years in general law, but eventually realized, “I loved law but hated practicing it.” In his pursuit of something new, Pillsbury began volunteering for Community Mediation, a nonprofit community-based mediation program in New Haven. When the executive director position opened up in 1989, he jumped at it.

Having served in that position over the past 19 years, Pillsbury has facilitated and trained in the areas of conflict resolution for individuals, businesses, schools, churches and government agencies, including police departments. After a particularly divisive racial shooting incident in 1997, he started his organization’s Dialog Project, which has brought faith communities together to remedy racial discrimination. He also founded the National Association of
Community Mediators.

“Mediation serves people whom the legal profession can’t serve, either because the issues are more human than legal, or because people don’t have the necessary resources,” Pillsbury says. “In doing so, we’ve become a growing part of the justice system.”

Pillsbury has also stayed true to his progressive leanings –– and his childhood nickname. In 2002 he ran for Congress as a Green Party candidate in Connecticut. “It’s the only party that hasn’t sold out and still opposes unjust wars,” he says. “I’m still a ‘fool’ in the sense that the fool is the only one who speaks the truth to the powers that be.”

This article appeared in the 2008 edition of BU Law's alumni magazine The Record.