Bill Strickland is a stealth speaker. He has the down-home, aw-shucks approach to public presentation nailed.

He says he has no prepared speech. Then leads us through an inricate, twisty narrative of intrigue and entrepreneurial success. He introduces characters offhandedly, as "a fellow called" and "another fellow called," and "a company called."

But the fellows always turn out to be people like Dizzy Gillespie and Willie Brown. And the company is always something stellar like IBM.

But the story - what a story it is.

It begins in the 1960s with Bill Strickland goofing his way through high school in New York City. One day he passes a school door and sees inside an art instructor working a potter's wheel.

It was love at first sight -- for the wheel, not the instructor, Frank Ross. But Ross agreed to take Strickland on as apprentice for two years. He still goofed his way through high school, but he was serious about ceramics. It inspired him to apply in pencil for college -- in pencil -- at the University of Pittsburgh.

By 1970, Strickland had graduated and established himself as someone ready to take on a challenge. He was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the Bidwell Training Center, a run-down remnant of the war on poverty, in Pittsburgh's Homestead neighborhood. The day he arrived he discovered the center owed $300,000 in back payroll taxes.

Strickland boasted that his stormy first days at Bidwell forced him to become a good manager. But he must also have exhibited some first class leadership, because the two organizations he ran over time took on a different air than their counterparts in other cities -- they thrived.

Twelve years ago, for instance, he had the old buildings razed and replaced them with first class architecture by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, including a first class fountain.

"My ambition was to create a magnificent place in the inner city," Strickland said, "for people who don't often have a nice day."

So he appealed to the board of the Carnegie Foundation to finance the building, including the fountain.

At Bidwell and the Craftsmen's Guild, he figured, his task was retrain out-of-work steelworkers for new lives, along with welfare mothers and at-risk kids.

So what was there about steelworkers, welfare mothers, and at-risk kids that they didn't deserve a fountain, to?

He commissioned artwork for the lobby of the new buildings. "The artwork is all to my taste," he explained, "because I raised the money."

He installed ceramics, paintings, sculpture, and exquisite handmade Japanese conference room furniture. (Because steelworkers, welfare mothers, and at-risk kids deserve good art and nice furniture, too. Memorize that sentence structure, because it is a mantra with Strickland.)

"See, I'm in the attitude business," he said. "To bring people back to life they must feel like the solution, not the problem." That's why he buys fresh-cut, real flowers for the lobby, not plastic.

(When a visitor asked how they came up with the idea of flowers, Strickland said he bought them himself. "You don't need a task force to buy flowers," he grumped.)

Excellence began making regular pilgrimages to Bidwell and the craftsmen's Guild. Sen. John Heinz, also of the Heinz Corp., threw cash at Strickland to create a food industry training program.  Soon scores of steelworkers, welfare mothers, etc. were creating gourmet food at the school -- and students were consuming it in the lunchroom. ("Because they deserve it. And because it's hard to teach people who are hungry.")

He built an amphitheater for the teaching chefs, who flew in from all over the world to offer demonstrations of culinary technique. 

A series of business types -- from IBM, Bayer, Thrift Drug, American Express, Alcoa, Fisher Scientific -- visited the school, were bewitched by the trout almondine, and became involved in expanding the school's offerings and facilities.

Soon Strickland was being hailed as a "social entrepreneur," spinning off successful for-profit operations from his school, and Bidwell was training everything from pastry chefs to chemical workers to pharmaceutical workers to travel agents. And these "steelworkers, welfare mothers, and at-risk kids" were as good as anyone in their fields.

The Craftsmen's Guild had a special story. Strickland combined the industrial knowledge from Bidwell and the artistic know-how at the Craftsmen's Guild to develop a technique for embedding photographic images on clay and other 3D planes.

Strickland built a first-class music hall for student recitals, and musicians from around the world heard about the program and began visiting, performing, and even recording there.

Dizzy Gillespie, Betty Carter, Herbie Hancock, Billy Taylor, Pat Metheny, Winton Marsalis, Louis Belson, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Burrell, Joe Williams, Tito Puente, Spyro Gyra, George Shearing and the Count Basie Band.

These are some of the names that trooped through and made music.

The Basie Band donated their concert, which was recorded on Magrilon 140 plastic made by AGFA, a division of Bayer, and went on to win a Grammy Award.

Howard Schultz of Starbucks met with Strickland -- that meeting featured the two unlikeliest great entrepreneurs of the decade -- and offered to sell Craftsmen's Guild CDs at his umpty zillion coffee shops.

And now they're recording on site, in a coveted recording studio. And they're doing video as well as audio. Look for a big deal upcoming with Blockbuster.

And on it goes. Plans to grow orchids and hydroponic tomatoes in another spinoff, sell real estate, and to buy the entire industrial park by the river.

Strickland is spearheading, with Willie Brown and Herbie Hancock, the development of a center like Bidwell/Craftsmen's Guild, in San Francisco. Only much bigger!

Strickland attended the installation of the new mayor of Pittsburgh, like himself a resident of the Homestead neighborhood. During the ceremony the mayor whispered in his ear, "The inmates have taken over the asylum."

But it's not so crazy, Strickland said. All you have to do is believe, and respect, and let people appreciate the life that is in them. Tell them, "I believe in you."

Hey, the economics are clear: $45,000 annual costs to keep a man in prison, $36,000 to put him through medical school. Physicians are a bargain compared to educating thugs -- which seems, if you turn your head and squint at the numbers, to be our preference.

Once people know they matter, Strickland said, they will walk their way out of poverty.

As they have.

"I believe in dreams,said Bill Strickland. "I am a romantic without apology. Because my life changed when I made a big old pot."

What did Strickland get for his trouble? He got something no other speaker has gotten in the 13 year history of the Masters Forum -- a two-minute standing ovastion.

Dick Leider "The Power of Purpose"

Michael Jones "Who Will Play Your Music?"