The City Hall brain trust is studying long and hard on whom to hire as our town's next city manager.

As well it should. Durham's recent experience with chief executives has not been very good.

Though it must be said that the three-year Patrick Baker regime, for all its calamities, has been a distinct improvement over the Marcia Conner disaster of 2001-'04.

Connor succeeded Lamont Ewell, who arrived in 1997 and went back to San Diego three years later, with Southpoint shopping center to show for the experience. Some folks in south Durham are still just busting with gratitude.

Musical managers does not good management make.

But Ewell came east just after Orville Powell retired early, after 13 years, with $70,000 -- thanks to a retirement package Powell had designed -- and a $30,000 consulting contract with the city.

On another hand, the three current candidates and any more who may be back on the B-list might want to be doing some studying of their own. Durham can be right hard on its CEOs, too.

Just ask Patrick Baker.

Taking a public position in Durham can be like going over the top at Verdun: sprinting into a blend of land mines, barbed wire and machine-gun fire with bayonets waiting just in case you actually get to the other side.

Durham hired its first city manager, Radford W. Rigsby in 1921, a move meant to get the politics out of city government. (We aren't making this up.) Durham went through nine managers before I. Harding Hughes Jr. took the job in 1963.

Still, the city and its top hand apparently got on pretty well -- the city council didn't see a need to give the manager a job review until 1977.

However, that first review was decreed two years after Wade Cavin won the mayor's seat while calling for Hughes to get the boot for various long-simmering reasons including (this is Durham) race relations.

With dwindling support on the city council, Hughes did hang on for two years, becoming Durham's longest-serving manager, before abruptly quitting. His successor, Dean Hunter, came from Kentucky, getting a salary 18 percent higher than Hughes' plus a new sedan to call his own.

Hunter lived in a motel while his family remained in Kentucky. He told city staff not to risk coming to work in a snowstorm, then publicly blasted those who didn't show up for work anyway.

He got a 5.5 percent raise in 1979, more than the rest of city employees, then fired the planning director who claimed he needed more staff.

But 1979 was another election year, and Hunter started looking for another job.

He was still looking in 1980 when another new mayor, the inimitable Harry Rodenhizer, told him to go.

"Durham has not been a good place to be a manager," the straight-talking Rodenhizer said.

At the same meeting it accepted Hunter's resignation, the city council hired his replacement -- Hunter's former assistant Barry Del Castilho.

"He knows who we are and he's still willing to take it," councilman Bill Smith said.

But only so far. After just two years, Del Castilho left to manage Amherst, Mass., a town one-third Durham's size with one-seventh as many town employees and five council members instead of 13.

Said Del Castilho, "It will be less stressful."