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Metro Chief Ready for Next Move
As Metro's interim general manager, Dan Tangherlini has developed a following among employees and riders of the regional transit agency.
(By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)
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But Tangherlini's imminent departure has left many others saddened. "When I heard it, my first reaction was, I lost hope," said station manager Etta McKnight. She and other employees are circulating a petition. They want Tangherlini to stay.
"He's the best thing that happened to us in years," she said. "He shows concern for the little people. He's real, not like someone coming out to get votes. And he has great ideas."
Childhood Ups and Downs
Even as a kid, he liked to fix things.
"By the time he was 2 1/2 , whatever was broken, he could fix," said his mother, Jane Kjems. The third of four boys, he often worked on cars and other toys taken from his older brothers' toy chests while they were at school. "He had the knack of knowing how things fit together," she said.
Tangherlini grew up in the central Massachusetts town of Auburn, a blue-collar community near Worcester, where his father, Frank, taught physics at the College of the Holy Cross. His parents divorced when he was in fifth grade. Money was tight. During high school summers, Tangherlini filled potholes, picked up trash and cleaned pit toilets.
"It was humility-inducing work," he said.
For his last two years of high school, he won a full scholarship to Milton Academy, a private boarding school outside Boston. At the University of Chicago, he tried economics, sociology and political science before finding his niche in public policy. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's.
He came to Washington in 1991 as a presidential management intern through an elite government recruiting program, and he was hired at the Office of Management and Budget. For several years, he worked as a budget analyst but "was champing at the bit" and "eager to fix things, to solve problems," according to his boss at the time, Michael Deich, an associate director. Tangherlini became Deich's special assistant, functioning as chief of staff. He worked round-the-clock and developed an intense coffee habit.
"He has a keenly analytical mind, and he has this joy, when faced with a new problem, to figure it out," Deich said.
Tangherlini worked briefly in the office of the U.S. transportation secretary, but found the duties unappealing "because you couldn't see any outcome."
He started to find more job satisfaction in 1998 when he started working for the District as chief financial officer for the police department. Anthony A. Williams (D) had just been elected mayor, and Tangherlini pulled double duty, at the police department by day and in the mayor's office by night, working on transition issues. He also began working toward his MBA from the Wharton School, traveling to Philadelphia on weekends. By 2000, Tangherlini took over what later became the city Transportation Department. His wife, Theresa, a nurse practitioner, had just given birth to their second daughter.
"That was probably the most crazy time," he said.
