Wising Up

A few things I wish I’d learned sooner

FOREWORD

Experience is what you get just after you needed it.

We tell each other stories all the time. Some stories we repeat so regularly that spouses and friends can see them coming, yet again. With luck, they yet again suffer through them uncomplainingly. Why do we repeat some stories over and over again, while other life experiences fade beyond the reach of memory? I think it’s because the ones we remember taught us something that we don’t want to forget, and re-telling the stories is more than just a way to amuse our friends—it’s a way to remind ourselves of the lessons we learned.

These pages contain some of the life lessons I’ve learned, and the stories of how I learned them. If experience truly is the best teacher, then these stories comprise my textbook.

But the writing of memoirs is dangerous, because memory is flawed—flawed by the obstruction of intervening events, and flawed by wishful thinking that produces revisionist history—the urge to downplay the painful and celebrate the delightful. I have worked hard to reconstruct what really happened, or at least to be faithful to my most honest recollection (or more recent realization) of what really happened—even when digging down and touching the truth has made me wince.

With few exceptions, my reproductions of dialogues that took place decades ago are not verbatim, of course; they are simply my best effort at capturing the essence of what transpired. In what follows, I have changed some first names and have omitted all last names except in the few cases where it matters if the reader knows the identity of the person (e.g., Fred Rogers, Chuck Jones). But I have not deliberately altered any events. Thus some whose names have been changed may nevertheless be recognizable to others who know them personally. I hope that in such circumstances I have not caused anyone hurt or harm, as such was never my intent. I have striven only to be truthful, in the hope that what I have gotten wise to might have value for another.

EAD
Princeton, New Jersey

Navigational note to the reader: this book is organized into ten major sections with headings that summarize one area of my wising up, under which you will find individual chapters telling of the experiences I had which brought me to the conclusion in the heading…

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Cruelty is always readily at hand.

COMMON DENOMINATOR

My older brother Jay preceded me into the U.S. Army. In those days Jay was as arrogant as I, and he pronounced his verdict on the companions I could expect when I went into uniform. “My bunkmate in boot camp is so stupid,” he lamented, “that he thinks Moby Dick is a venereal disease.”

Even discounting for the witticism, I didn’t expect much intellectual companionship when I boarded the bus for Fort Ord, and the truth is I didn’t find much. That was probably more due to my having brought along a few books which I kept my nose in, than to any shortage of interesting companions if I’d troubled to ferret them out. But I did find out a few troubling things about myself. The most troubling of them?

I found out I was capable of being brutal.

There is a famous experiment devised by research psychologists that demonstrates the capacity for brutality which normal, average people will exhibit under certain conditions. It goes like this. The subject is ushered into a clinical-looking room by a “doctor”—the big authority figure in a white lab coat—and is seated before a control panel. Right in front of the subject is a large dial just below a big gauge. The gauge has marks on it that indicate increasing levels of electric shock, with clearly named danger levels written right on the face of the dial: “mild buzz”, “unpleasant sting”, “sharp jolt”, “burning shock”, “extremely painful searing”, “danger: may cause unconsciousness”. Next to the dial that controls the level of electricity is a big red pushbutton marked “Administer shock”.

Okay, says the “doctor”, we’re trying to find out how much pain people can stand. In the next room where you can’t see him is a volunteer, and we have wired up metal bands to his body. When you push this button marked “Administer shock” a little electricity will go through the metal bands and the volunteer will feel it. All you have to do is to follow my instructions. I will tell you where to set the dial that determines the strength of shock, and when to push the button to administer it. Do you understand? Are you ready?

With that the experiment commences. The “doctor” tells the subject to set the dial on low—“mild buzz”—and push the button. When the subject pushes the button, there is a muffled “oh” from the next room. The doctor makes notes on his chart. Now set it up to the next level, the “doctor” says. Push the button. Through the wall comes a clear “ouch!”. The “doctor” makes more notes. Okay, he says, raise it another notch, and hit the button again. This time a loud “Ow! Ow!” erupts, followed by a subsiding whimper.

Along about now, most subjects ask the “doctor” if this is really okay. In tones of deep authority and a little annoyance, the “doctor” says of course it’s okay and implies the subject is somehow inadequate for having even asked.

Up the dial another notch, he says, and hit the button again. The subject follows orders, and this time the scream of pain from the next room is deeply upsetting.

Are you sure this is okay?

What’s the matter, aren’t you up to doing this job?

Oh, okay…

And so it goes. An astounding proportion of the subjects who do this experiment are willing to crank up the dial all the way and inflict the ultimate levels of pain on the “volunteers” whose cries of agony are unmistakable. The subjects are just doing what they are told. Told by an “authority figure”.

I read about this experiment in college. I became the live subject of it a year later in Army boot camp, and I learned to my disgust that I was not immune to inflicting pain when my own ego was at stake.

When I hit Fort Ord, I was assigned to a Company which was made up of four Platoons. Each 15-man Platoon needed a Platoon Leader, and from the assembled multitude the Senior Drill Sergeant singled out four of us—possibly because we were the only ones looking him in the eye at the time. This meant two things: one, I got a private bedroom; second, I was responsible for the performance of fifteen men next door in a barracks room full of bunks, men who would be my closest companions during our eight weeks of boot camp.

This was a promising start. I had joined the Army through a then-popular option called RFA ’55, under which you could serve six months of active duty and then serve about fifty years of weekends in the Army Reserve or the National Guard. I figured I could put up with anything for six months. More, I decided that if I were going to endure the Army thing anyhow, I might as well really do it up right. No sense in going through this stuff screaming and kicking. Nope, I’d jump in with both feet. I’d figure out this game and make an experiment of it. I would become the perfect soldier.

I started winning right away. Every week, there was an inspection of the troops by some relatively high-ranking officer. He was like a dog-show judge, looking for the best of breed—as measured by such timeless values as shiniest boots, straightest “gig line” (vertical alignment of shirt placket, belt buckle, and pants fly), fastest routine of flipping an M-1 rifle through its paces, best answers to some rote-memory catechism of Army orders. The winner was named “Colonel’s Orderly”, and the prize was a weekend pass to get off base while all the rest of the Company, the losers, pulled lonely guard duty around the clock.

Winning the pass was a dual joy—avoidance of pain, pursuit of pleasure. As for the pain, well, nobody exactly looked forward to marching guard duty along the remote fences strung across the desolate dunes around Fort Ord, trudging through sand in heavy boots, groping along in the fog in the middle of the night. And the daylight hours after pulling duty weren’t much of a treat either, sitting around the base, groggy from getting too little sleep the night before, reading dog-eared old magazines or taking in mediocre movies you’d seen a couple of years before at home.

Meanwhile, pleasure sublime lay on the other side of the fence. Fort Ord was just a couple of miles from one of my favorite places in the world—the Monterey Peninsula, with Pebble Beach, Carmel, and Big Sur all just minutes away. As a teenager, I had dated a girl who attended a private school on the Peninsula and knew it well. I had also spent many picture-perfect weekends in the area with other friends over the years, competing in sailboat regattas at Stillwater Cove in Pebble Beach and playing golf on celebrated courses which deserved far better treatment than I was able to give them. And now, my current girlfriend and her family from Fresno had taken a house in Carmel for their own weekend and summer pleasure, and every hormone in my body was agitating for the relief that beckoned just down the road.

I pretty much got a lock on Colonel’s Orderly—after I won it the first time, the commanding officer seemingly found it easier not to confuse himself with alternatives in subsequent weeks, so he just kept picking me. Things were going alright, and by the fifth week I sort of assumed a weekend pass was my divine right. Nobody offered a serious challenge any more in the Colonel’s Orderly competition, and I was on cruise control. Or so I thought.

“Daley,” the Commanding Officer (our “C.O.”) said to me one day, “this guy Ambrose in your Platoon is screwing up. Better straighten him out, or you’re in danger of losing your weekend pass, Colonel’s Orderly or not.” The C.O. knew how to get my attention.

I don’t remember what Ambrose’s sins were. Could have been anything. But I began to monitor him intensely. His performance was suddenly a life-or-death matter to me. No pasty-faced kid from a dusty wheat farm in the flatlands of eastern Oregon was going to cost me a lush weekend in Carmel. I hadn’t spent a weekend on base yet and had never walked guard duty. Ambrose was not about to break my winning streak.

I was twenty. I was bereft of the knowledge, maturity, and patience to evoke enhanced performance from another twenty-year-old. So after about the third time Ambrose committed whatever sin he was doomed to commit, despite my constant warnings to the contrary, I ushered him into the private quarters of the Senior Drill Instructor—which were to be preferred to my own room, since I expected this to be a rather noisy affair and his walls were of concrete while mine were of wood. There I proceeded to beat the hell out of this poor kid. He was bigger than me by a fair measure, but I had manic motivation going for me. By the time it was over, he was pretty much a battered lump. Somebody got him off to the infirmary for a bit of freshening up.

I didn’t give the incident much more thought that day and began to savor my plans for the next weekend in Carmel. My reverie was interrupted several hours later by an order to report to the Company commander.

Moments later I was standing at attention before his desk:

“Did you beat him up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Probably needed it, from what I hear. But we’ve got a problem.”

“Sir?”

“He called his mother. His mother called her Congressman. Her Congressman called the Commanding General of Fort Ord demanding a full investigation, prosecution of the responsible parties, and all that shit. The General called me and told me to handle it and report back to him. I guess I’ve gotta do something to you.”

“Sir?”

“Article 15. You know what an Article 15 is—disciplinary action that’s less than a court-martial but, you know, still pretty serious.”

“What’s likely to be the punishment, sir?”

“Well, we’ve got a pretty wide range of options there. We’ll have the hearing first, and then I’ll decide.”

So a day or two later, we had a hearing in which I formally confessed, the Senior Drill Instructor said nice things about me and not so nice things about Ambrose, and some others pretty much aped him. The Company commander pronounced sentence: Private Daley, you are hereby assigned thirty hours of extra duty.

What kind of extra duty, I wondered. Would I be doing heavy labor on some military chain gain, or maybe marching the perimeter fence on late-night guard duty, or…

“Daley, I am ordering you to spend ten three-hour evening shifts in the recreation room. You’ll be…ah…supervising…the pool tables. And if people need somebody to play with, you’ll have to do that, too. “

Huh? Pool was my favorite recreation when I had free time on base. What was going on?

“That’s all. The hearing is over. You are dismissed, Daley. Report for your first shift tonight at nineteen hundred hours.”

He didn’t quite wink at me, but he might as well have. I later learned that the Senior Drill Instructor had told the Commanding Officer how much I enjoyed shooting pool and thus guided his definition of my punishment. Unfortunately, neither could do anything about waiving the standing rule which stipulated that anyone convicted of an Article 15 violation was henceforth ineligible for the Colonel’s Orderly competition, so any weekend passes in the future had to come my way by dint of some other rationale.

Of course I had to find one. By this point, the idea of actually spending a weekend at Fort Ord was unthinkable. There had to be another route out of there. And there was: superior performance on the rifle range.

Getting my first weekend pass out of the rifle-range was as simple as it was unexpected. I won it for shooting the best score in my Company during our preliminary exercises, staged the week before the final test that would pin us down forever as lowly Marksman, ordinary Sharpshooter, or esteemed Expert. My winning the preliminary would have surprised my high school hunting buddies as much as it did me. We had spent a lot of time as teenagers winging away at things with .22s and shotguns, and they would recall me as the guy who could take a fifty shots and still never hit a moving object—bird, rabbit, field mouse—while they, by contrast, were skilfully blasting little creatures into oblivion with every squeeze of the trigger. But for some totally inexplicable reason, those bulls-eye targets all propped up standing nice and still on the sand dunes at Fort Ord looked like barn doors to me, and I simply couldn’t miss.

But not so this poor kid Dwayne. He was hopeless. You always knew which target was Dwayne’s because every time we opened fire, sprays of sand kicked up all around it. And there were rarely any holes in it. The firing-range instructors labored over him until, finally, one by one, each had stalked away shaking his head in a swirl of profanity. Nobody could help him. Nothing worked. Dwayne was headed straight for the dreaded informal designation of “bolo”—a rifleman whose score was so awful he does not even qualify as a Marksman.

To my dismay, Dwayne’s ineptitude turned out to be my problem. He was in my Platoon. And three days before the final shooting test, we Platoon Leaders were solemnly informed by the Company Commander that there was a weekend pass in it for each of us who had a bolo-free Platoon.

And weekend guard duty awaited those who didn’t. Sort of double or nothing.

So I took Dwayne out for extra time on the range, practicing until dusk settled so deeply we couldn’t make out the profile of the targets against the darkening dunes. Dwayne pumped lots of lead into those dunes before nightfall, but the paper targets survived his fusillades unscathed. It didn’t matter what firing position he tried—standing, sitting, prone. They all yielded the same result, and the same sour conclusion: this little son-of-a-bitch Dwayne is going to cost me my weekend in Carmel.

Unless…unless…what if Dwayne were for some reason unable to compete in the final! What if…what if…what if he got sick? Nah, that’d never work—he’d have to go along with it, and I didn’t trust his abilities as a thespian. Wait! What if something happened to his hand! What if…say…somehow his trigger finger got injured…yeah, got broken! Yes, that’s it. His trigger finger gets broken. Come on, a broken finger’s no big deal. It’ll heal in a few weeks, Dwayne’d be spared the humiliation of bolo-ing, and I’ll get my weekend in Carmel.

The dial had been cranked up another notch, and my finger was on the button. Again.

Break Dwayne’s finger. Simple. But how? But how? I mean, I couldn’t just ask Wayne stick it out so I could snap it. Or not, at least, if I didn’t want another Article 15 or—more likely—a Court Martial this time. So how could I just sort of casually break his index finger in a way that looked a lot like, you know, an accident?

Eureka!

Later that evening unsuspecting Dwayne was seated across from me at a small table in the recreation room. I could tell he enjoyed being seen sitting with me. While he was already used to some extra attention from me, up until now it had consisted entirely of my futile coaching and peevish haranguing out there on the firing range. Now, here he was socializing with his Platoon Leader in the rec room.

So he was only too willing to do whatever I suggested, and it took just about three or four rounds of arm wrestling with him before I had my plan completely figured out and rehearsed: next time, with just a subtle twist of my hand, I’ll accidentally slip out of our thumb-lock grip and instantly re-clamp my fist hard around his index finger, carrying all the force I would have employed to flatten his entire arm. But this time that force would carry only one slender finger backward and snap it like a well-dried wishbone. Hot damn! This is going to work! Everything was perfect. My weekend in Carmel was in the bag.

I have to believe that if some authority figure—the “doctor”—had been there to give the order, I’d probably have gone ahead and snapped Dwayne’s finger.

But there wasn’t and I didn’t.

Dwayne must have had a guardian angel who interceded before I had a chance to do it. Instead, just an instant before moving from rehearsal to actual mutilation, I had an inspiration. This was an inspiration that still included my getting a pass to go to Carmel that weekend, of course. If that hadn’t been part of the vision, Dwayne would probably still be suffering today from a poorly mended compound fracture of his right index finger torn loose at the first joint.

But fortunately for Dwayne, I had a flash of math. A perfect score on the range was 250. You needed 150 for Marksman, 200 for Sharpshooter, and 225 for expert. I had shot 247 in the preliminaries. Maybe, just maybe, there was another way to handle this problem. I just had to make a few arrangements.

Three days later, our Company was bussed out to the rifle range where a line of several dozen shooting stations strung out along the dunes opposite an equal number of targets propped against a distant embankment. A trio of us made our way together to a spot near the center of the line. We staked out three places next to each other.

Okay, Dwayne. This is your post. Get yourself ready. Ronnie, you flank him on the other side.

Ronnie, an excellent shot who was also in my platoon, took up the station immediately to Dwayne’s left and settled comfortably into his pre-firing routine. He knew what he was there to do. Then I positioned myself at the shooting station just to Dwayne’s right, and we waited together for the order to commence firing.

When the order came, I took aim and carefully put enough shots into my own target to get the 150 points that would get me out of the bolo category into Marksman. I then looked over to Ronnie and watched while he finished doing the same. When we were both sure he too was safely over the line, we silently nodded to each other and subtly shifted our aim to converge our fire on Dwayne’s pristine target standing still unperforated between ours.

Minutes later Dwayne’s target was in tatters.

So Dwayne became a Marksman, at least in the official records of the United States Army. Ronnie got his six-pack or whatever it was that I promised him if he’d share his bulls-eyes with Dwayne and settle for Marksman himself. And I got my weekend in Carmel.

I didn’t brutalize anybody else while I was in the Army, or ever after. But I still have occasional fantasies about doing it. Maybe they’ll show up in a novel, if I ever get around to writing one.

Recently, I fell into conversation over drinks with an aging, emeritus member of the Irish mafia in Boston who had made no effort to conceal his lifelong vocation. I asked a few innocent but probing questions about his experiences, like, for example, just how much violence really does go on? In his classic squeaky Irish brogue, twisted by advancing age into a kind of crackly, offhanded cackle, he brushed off the media’s sensationalizing of mob-violence.

“You know,” he croaked, “the whole trick is to hurt a few fellows pretty bad real early in your career. Once people know you’re willing to hurt them, well, you’d be surprised how little you really have to do it after that.”

I prefer to think that I myself stopped because I outgrew it, but I can’t be 100% certain.

STOPPING OFF IN HURON

You begin to get a picture of Huron, California, when I tell you that the speed limit on the main street was 45 MPH. There’s not a lot to add to the picture, because there wasn’t much else there. You have seen Western movies where the camera opens with a long shot looking down from a distant hilltop, picking up a cluster of small buildings plunked down sort of arbitrarily in the middle of a vast plain, baking there by itself in the sun. You remember the single road which angles clear across the screen, approaching town over parched, empty spaces from beyond the yonder horizon, then prying in half the little cluster of wooden structures, finally exiting at the other end bent for another horizon. As it passes through, the rutted dirt strip serves as the main street of the settlement that bulges to either side, framing it with false-front, single-story wooden buildings. Livery stable, feed and grain store, hardware, a small general store with groceries, a few eateries, and bars—mostly bars.

Huron was still pretty much that way when I rode into town in 1955, at seventeen. My college buddy Walt had worked there the previous summer in the cantaloupe packing sheds, and he had connections.

“C’mon out and work with me. I know I can get you on. It’s hotter than hell, hunnerd and ten or something, and the work isn’t easy, that’s for damned sure. But you’ll make a ton of money—look what I hauled in last year. I got my car and the pink slip with it.”

Walt had a truly enviable car, a pristine, seafoam green ’50 Chevy convertible, lowered all around, customized with frenched headlights and taillights. Waxed to a sheen, sparkling white top and upholstery and wide whitewalls. Dual pipes. Fender skirts that he installed when the top was down and removed when the top was up, an aesthetic gesture only a California kid growing up in the car culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s could appreciate. And Walt had the “pink slip”, proof that he owned it free and clear.

If that was the reward for spending July and August doing grubby work in the broiling sun, hey, man, I was ready to pay the price.

And so Walt and I headed for Huron across the endless flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley, my fantasies full of a sporty convertible to cruise around campus in the fall, and Walt eager for the fireworks that lay just ahead.

“Wait’ll you meet Tony,” said Walt as we barrelled down the highway. “He’s a dude! He’s so cool! And I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen between him and Angela!”

“Him and Angela? Tell me about it.”

This Tony, it turns out, was a regular on the melon-packing circuit, following the crops up and down the West Coast as they came into season. But unlike migrant workers who toil in the fields and arrive at each new town without a particular job, hoping to be shipped out in a busload of hands rounded up by a labor contractor, Tony had a real job, more an itinerant than a migrant. He worked for the same company Walt and I did, moving between its sundry packing sheds scattered in dusty farm towns from the Imperial Valley down by the Mexican border all the way north to Yakima, Washington. Tony was part of the crop-following elite, well paid and well respected for the tough, hard, dirty work he did all day as straw boss, keeping mountains of fruit moving from field to truck to packing shed to refrigerated boxcar before it spoiled.

“What’s this about Angela?”

“Angela’s his Huron woman. Tony’s got women in every damn town there is. He is the all-time stud, you won’t believe it he’s got so many women! Tony lives with Angela when he’s in Huron. At least they used to. That’s why I can’t wait to see what’ll happen this year.”

“What’s the deal?”

“Last summer—the last night Tony was in town—him and Angela had this big fight, see. He roughed her up some, over at her place. Then he goes stalking out the door and Angela, she’s so pissed off she picks up this big #10 can of peaches and flings it at him. Catches him right in the back of the skull and coldcocks him. Boom! Down for the count! He was flat out cold.”

“And?”

“Whaddayathink? She ran like hell and hid out for a couple of days until she was sure Tony had left town. He’s one tough son-of-a-bitch, and you know she didn’t want to tangle with him when he came to. She lost a coupla days’ take hiding out.”

“What’s she do?”

“She’s a whore.”

The huge packing shed dominated the skyline of Huron, dwarfing the small bars and stores strung along the highway through town. They all would have fit inside it. We headed straight for the shed, to check in with our boss and to find Walt’s fabled stud Tony. But he found us first.

“Hey, Walt! They told me you were coming back, amigo. Que paso? What’s happening, man?”

Tony lifted himself easily on his fingertips from his perch sitting on the lip of the loading dock and hopped lightly down onto the dirt road to meet us as we approached. He was as cool as Walt said. Thirty or so, handsome as only Latin men can be handsome, gleaming black hair and gleaming white teeth, walnut-toned skin smooth as butter, lean body, lithe and graceful. His Levis and blue workshirt looked like a tux on him.

Greetings and introductions and small talk passed around. Tony, it turned out, had hit town just a few minutes before we had. And, he added, “Been driving since five this morning. I’m starved.”

We headed across the street, where half a dozen bars and cafes lined the dusty road. “El Rancho’s the best,” Walt instructed me. “Make great tacos. Don’t ever go to the Rialto. They use dog meat in their tacos.”

I forced a snicker at Walt’s uncharacteristically lame joke. Tony caught my effort and dismissed it. “He’s right,” Tony said simply, and he wasn’t kidding.

We were only steps away from the door of the El Rancho when Tony spotted her coming out of another bar at the far end of the block. Angela was hard to miss—not at all the person I would have imagined this romantic-looking Latino shacking up with. She must have been six feet tall, probably one seventy. Not fat, but plenty chunky. Short blond hair, raggedy like she cut it herself. Pretty rough complexion, you could tell almost a block away. She looked like a simpleton.

She spotted Tony in almost the same instant. She froze. Hand still on the door, she gripped it tight, not knowing whether to plunge back into the bar and swing it closed behind her, or to hide behind it, or. . .

“Angela, baby!” Tony settled it. “Annnnngelllllllla” he crooned and began a slow-motion lope toward her, arms wide to embrace her.

Angela’s simple face fairly rippled with relief, flashing ribbons of blush red and waves of silly grin as she flushed a year of deep fear all over the main street of Huron. She took a couple of tentative steps toward Tony, then broke into a lumbering run, arms outstretched to meet her forgiving lover.

She was an arm’s length away when he pole-axed her. With a graceful pivot off his left foot, Tony brought his embracing right arm back to his shoulder, transformed it into a straight right to Angela’s chin, and—whop! She sank in a heap, letting out a squeaky little sigh before she finished settling across the sidewalk still and silent.

I was paralysed. I might still be standing there but for Tony’s nonchalant summons: “C’mon, guys. What’r you waiting for. Let’s eat.” He stepped across the soft hulk of Angela and headed into the El Rancho.

We slid into a red leatherette booth deep in the darkness of the El Rancho bar and ordered tacos and beer. Lucy, another of Huron’s ladies of the night, came by looking for day work, nooners. Walt and I declined and she didn’t bother with Tony. She knew he was family. Not a word was exchanged between any of us about Angela. We talked baseball, hot weather, the melon crop, cars, watches.

Watches are a big deal to migrant workers. Tony owned perhaps a dozen or fifteen very expensive watches, and I came quickly to understand why. They function as a very convenient form of transportable, convertible currency for men who live on the road without benefit of formal banking relationships and may need to barter or pawn their assets on short notice. What is more, a man could wear them all to bed at night, arms folded under his head, making work difficult for a sneak thief more adept at lifting a wallet from pants slung nearby than removing watches without waking the wearer. Tony fell asleep each night wearing his entire net worth like armor from wrists to elbows.

Walt and I sat facing the front door of the El Rancho, and Tony sat across from us in the booth. Each time the front door swung open, a blinding white blare of harsh sunlight blasted into the darkened bar with almost physical impact, enough to make me wince and look away. Soon I took to averting my glance from the door as soon as it began to open and wished for it to close as quickly as possible.

One time it stayed open for an uncommonly long time, though, and I squinted toward the impossibly bright torrent of hot light flaming the doorway. Then I made out a person-sized blur in the middle of the light—about the size of Angela. She hesitated in the doorway, at once clearing her head and preparing to grope her way into the dark bar from the dazzling sunlight outside. She steadied herself with a hand on the door jamb, then half lunged in and fumbled along, gripping the backs of booths as she felt her way deeper into the darkness toward us.

As she came closer, I was mesmerized, my mind spinning with visions of danger. Did she have a knife, or a gun? I couldn’t see her right hand. Should I warn Tony who, with his back to the door, was unaware of her approach? Damn the glare from the door and the darkness of the bar! I couldn’t read the expression on her face, the look in her eyes. She was just a faceless apparition approaching, backlit and spooky, like a figure from a horror movie. Was she murderous? Should I get up and run?

Too late for my muddled mind to decide: she was on top of us. She stopped right behind Tony, who was still unaware of her standing over him. I could not imagine what was going to happen next. And I could never have predicted what did happen next.

She hipped her way into the booth, settled in beside him. He gave way and slid over a few inches, enough to make more room for her but not to distance himself from her. They sat there for a second, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. She turned a hopeful face to Tony that spoke the question before the words came out: “Okay now, Tony?”

“Okay, Angela. It’s okay now,” Tony replied softly, with both caring and respect.

The kissed sweetly, he ordered her some tacos and a beer, and they lived happily ever after. Or at least until the end of the melon harvest of 1955.

DYING IN HURON

I learned about the price of a life that first summer in Huron. Or, to be more precise, I learned about the then-current basis of pricing lives in farming towns in California.

It had all to do with money in the pocket.

The lesson was not long in coming. After finishing off our tacos and beer in the El Rancho, Walt and I headed back over to the packing shed while Tony and Angela headed to her place to consummate their reconciliation.

The boss gave me my first assignment: “You’re gonna be a shookup man. Working with Tim Short. He’s fast and he’s good, so he’ll run your ass off. He’ll also expect you to have the area all set up by the time he hits town day after tomorrow. Better get hustling.”

I waited ‘til we got outside, then asked Walt, “What does he mean I’m going to be shook up? What the hell’s going to happen, anyhow?”

Walt laughed. “No, you’re not going to be shook up. You’re going to be a shook-up man for Tim.”

“You won’t think me terminally stupid if that’s a distinction devoid of meaning for me right now…?”

He explained. Cantaloupes got packed in wooden crates, back in those days. Same way oranges used to be, before everything went to cardboard cartons once they found a way to impregnate cardboard with wax to stave off deterioration from excess moisture—juices seeping from overripe fruit, condensation puddling inside refrigerated boxcars moving across hot deserts and plains, hoboes urinating. Men like Tim Short were itinerant wooden crate-makers, following the harvest up and down the coast just like the field hands, the packers, and the straw-bosses like Tony.

Tim would be arriving in town on Wednesday with his nailing machine in the back of his truck, and I would have an acre of space cleared for him. Not just for his machine but, more importantly, to make room to stockpile the thousands and thousands of crates he that would crank out of his nailing machine ahead of demand, before the fruit started arriving at the packing shed.

He would make the crates out of “shook”.

It turns out that shook is the name for the wooden slats and end-pieces that a crate is made up of. My job was to keep a constant supply of shook stacked right where Tim’s hands would fall on them—to keep his shook ‘up’—as he worked.

The crate-nailing machine stood eight feet high, five feet wide, a complicated Rube-Goldberg contraption with racks and slots and bins for the slats and end-pieces and nails. Tim and that machine stared each other down, day in and day out, for Tim’s whole adult life until wax-impregnated cardboard made both of them obsolete.

They worked as one. Standing between two waist-high stacks of fresh pine end pieces, Tim would ease himself into an inner rhythm, rocking himself through his moves like a good sushi chef. His hands would drop in unison to his side. Each plucked an end piece, flipped them deftly into vertical slots on either side of the machine, and then moved in tandem, like a breaststroke, to an overhead rack of slats for the sides. His sure fingers picked off exactly three slats each time, spaced them snap/snap/snap like a bridge across the exposed edges of the end pieces, and then stomped his right foot down on the shin-high bar that triggered the nailing machine’s hammering arms. Whomp! A dozen nails pounded home in one shudder, and suddenly the crate began to take shape. Tim pulled the three-slatted side from the machine, the two end pieces dangling from the tips of the slats, and rotated it a quarter turn. He slammed it back into the machine, plucked three more slats, spread them evenly snap/snap/snap, stomped the nailing bar again, Whomp!, absorbed the shudder, and whipped out the now two-thirds finished crate. Quick rotation, three more slats, one more crunch, Whomp!, and he pulled a finished crate from the nailer and sent it spooling down the conveyor.

It all took twelve seconds.

Like a rhythmic robot, smooth and silent, humourless and efficient, Tim Short would turn out a crate every twelve seconds all summer long—to my great regret. I not only had to keep the shook “up”, reloading constantly to keep those waist-high piles of end pieces waist high, and stacking plenty of slats ready to pluck off in threes in the overhead rack, and pouring the nail reservoirs full of nails so a dozen would be driven home each time he hit the trigger bar.

I also had to grab the finished crates off the conveyor four at a time and stack them, thousands of them, in what became warehouse-sized stockpiles from which they would be taken at an even more rapid rate once the melons were being packed. The bigger those piles got, the farther I had to run with each new armful—eventually, a city block or more.

And for good measure I had to patch the “cripples”, the occasional crate that came out with a few nails missing—because I had let the nail bin get too low—or with a slat crooked or broken because a knot in the wood had messed it up.

I was forever behind in my grabbing and stacking. And Tim had zero sense of humor for anything that delayed his creation of the next crate. He got paid by the piece, and my backlogs cost him money every time he had to stop nailing and wait for me to clear the area where he tossed the finished crates. With each passing dime, his voice got more shrill in demanding that I get my ass in gear.

Lucille Ball created one of the greatest comedy scenes in history frantically trying to stay abreast of the chocolates coming down a conveyor belt that she was supposed to be fitting into packages. On TV, it is a riot. In real life, it was actually as close to hell as anything I have ever encountered.

The work was almost impossibly hard—relentless, dirty, hot, uninspiring. From the first minutes of the day, the scurrying of my feet in the fine dry dirt raised low clouds of powdery soil the consistency of flour that coated me all over. By the end of the first hour, my sweat had turned the dirt clinging to my skin into a mildly abrasive mud that chafed everywhere my clothing rubbed me and turned the insides of my thighs to raw meat where my rough Levis abraded my flesh without mercy.

Tim worked like a man possessed, knowing we had only a few weeks before the melons started rolling in. Never mind that we got paid piece-work, so much per crate. That wasn’t what really drove him. With Tim it was a matter of honor to make sure the packers could maintain their own rapid-robot pace when it came their turn, snatching melons from their bins into the crates as fast as their hands could move. We were a vital link in a fragile machine. He knew we had to get way ahead, since we could never make crates fast enough to keep up with the demand once we were in the “snow”—the ironic name given the four-week period of 110-degree days and 95-degree nights when the harvest is at its peak, with hundreds of trucks heaped with melons streaming in endlessly from farms all across the valley, ‘round the clock, dumping tidal waves of cantaloupes into the massive packing shed where thirty or forty packers would be slapping them into crates four at a time. When those days came, everyone would work 18-hour days, then fall exhausted into the back seats of their cars after midnight to sleep hard until it all began again at dawn.

So I went into the field next to the packing shed to clear an area for Tim’s nailing machine and for the mountains of crates he would nail and I would stack before the summer ended. A pile of scrap lumber and trash surrounded the power pole we were to tap Tim’s machine into, so I set about clearing it away. The second piece I moved was a sun-bleached, warped piece of plywood, about two-thirds of a sheet. Just large enough to cover the crumpled body of the dead man lying under it.

Everything was tan. The dirt. The lumber. His clothes. His sallow skin. Even the wooden handle of the butcher knife protruding from his breastbone.

“A Friday job,” opined the indifferent cop. “Happens all the time.

“What do you mean, ‘a Friday job’?”

“Everybody around here gets paid on Friday. And they all get paid cash, since most of them’s wetbacks. So everybody knows everybody else’s got a pocketful of dough. Happens all the time.”

“Like, how often?”

“Thievin’? Half a dozen every weekend. Somebody wind up dead? Ever’ coupla weeks. I’d get out of here and head home on Fridays if I was you.”

Sounded like fine advice to me. It took on immediacy the very next week.

While Walt and I were getting used to sleeping in our cars, Tony had gone about upgrading his accommodations on the job site. (His living arrangements with Angela allowed for his crashing at the job site some nights, either because he was on call as straw boss or because she needed to service a client at her place.) Tony had noted that the night watchman at the shed had a cot in his office. He also reasoned that a night watchman should be keeping watch at night and not sleeping on a cot.

In the name of increased security, then, the cot wound up next to Tony’s car in the field where we all parked and camped out. It was his private prize.

The next Friday night, in the wee hours, something stirred Tony from his slumber on his cot. From the corner of one waking eye, he saw the figure of a man standing over him, both hands raised over his head wielding a baseball-bat-sized 2X4. The club came whistling down with horrific force, just as Tony rolled away from it. Whang! It crunched into the pipe frame that arched across the head of the cot where Tony’s own head had lain a split second before. The blow collapsed the pipe, leaving a crease six inches deep. Tony’s head would have been splattered like an overripe melon.

The marauder scuttled away like the invisible night winds and disappeared while Tony cleared his senses. His instinct for combat and revenge awoke too slowly for pursuit. Besides, he was naked, and his macho pride would have further delayed him while he dressed for the part. Walt and I emerged trembling from our cars right adjacent to him, almost as shaken as Tony by the viciousness of the attack. We commiserated until dawn. And I said selfish little silent prayers of thanksgiving that the attacker went after Tony and not me.

Once again, the price of a life seemed to be whatever was in a man’s pocket. I have always assumed, of course, that the assailant was a garden variety Friday-night thief who was after Tony’s wallet, although in retrospect I suppose I shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of a cranky night watchman.

So, after a week on the job, I had my first corpse and my first brush with a murderous attacker. I had to wait almost a month to actually witness my first murder.

There was labor trouble in Huron that summer. The packers decided to strike for more money.

The packers are the men who work inside the shed, bellied up to huge sloping bins full of melons. From dawn until midnight during the “snow”, their hands fly deftly across the waves of fruit rolling down the bins toward them, plucking out same-sized globes. They look first to pick off and pack out the big ones—27’s, named for the number of them that fill a single crate—and then scan the pile in front of them to decide what size to pack the next crate with. Maybe 36’s, 45’s, 54’s, from largest to smallest.

Packers get paid piece work, too, and the most productive of them are masters at estimating which size fruit within reach will snugly fill a crate with like-sized melons. They always prefer the big ones, the 27’s, of course. The price per crate is the same no matter the size of the melons, and anybody can figure out it takes twice as many moves and twice as much time to put 54 melons in a crate. But the big money makers were the steady guys who relentlessly scan the bin right in front of them, compute what’s within easy reach, and work with it.

Although the money these men made during the four or five months of prime harvest up and down the coast paid their bills for the rest of the year, until next spring’s early harvest down south, no one ever seems to feel they have enough money. And the hotter the days and nights, the heavier the flow of fruit and the harsher the pressure to move it before it spoils, the longer the workdays and the shorter each night’s sleep—the less adequate the packers’ money seemed to them.

And so they walked out, right in the middle of the snow. What had been moments before a bustling factory churning out thousands of crates bulging with melons was suddenly suspended motionless in the shimmering blast of sun. Tens of thousands of melons lying in the bins, dozens of trucks heaped with fresh fruit from the fields lining the roadway to the loading dock, boxcars standing by to take on the newly-packed crates. All still as death, as the packers matter-of-factly took off their aprons at precisely noon, folded and laid them with exaggerated care on the edge of the bin at their own spots, and sauntered out into the blinding sunlight to have the afternoon off.

They took the next day off and the one after that, too, while negotiations were presumably taking place somewhere between their leaders and the increasingly frantic shippers whose freshly picked fruit rots in a matter of hours in that fierce heat.

More and more melon trucks queued up uselessly in a line which now extended clear down the highway beyond the last building in town, drivers roasting angrily in dusty cabs which became insufferably hot ovens, reaching over 125 degrees in the pounding harshness of the open sun. The usual small pile of culls—melons too ripe to stand shipment—grew ominously as forklift trucks dumped bin after bin. By late afternoon the second day, there was no place left to dump new culls and they spilled out into the dirt road around the shed. Cars skirted them, trucks pulverized them into an ugly orange stew.

The tough owners and managers of huge melon farms, big men used to getting their way, stormed into town in their big cars the first afternoon of the strike, roaring up to the shed in clouds of dust to demand an explanation of the hold up: why hadn’t their trucks returned for fresh loads? Why wasn’t the fruit moving? Who’s at fault here? Everyone grew surlier by the hour, wanted somebody’s ass. An explosive tension crackled in the superheated air.

The detonator rolled into town the next morning as a battered blue bus carrying thirty-five or forty laborers rounded up by a labor contractor working for the shippers, headed for the shed. They were “scabs”, temporary workers called in to keep the fruit moving at all costs before the whole harvest rotted away in the sweltering shed, in the stalled trucks, and on the untended vines in fields where pickers idly sat and smoked and dozed waiting for empty trucks to return to move the fruit out.

With trouble inevitable, the California Highway Patrol had half a dozen patrol cars cruising the few streets of Huron all day, and the packers spent the afternoon out of sight in Huron’s bars and brothels. At the end of the day, the scabs were loaded back into the bus and shipped out of town for safekeeping while the packers were still occupied elsewhere.

But somehow one scab stayed behind in the shed, for whatever reason. Word spread through the El Rancho where we were finishing our dinner and beers, and up and down the rest of main street: there’s a scab in the shed. Before long, a few dozen packers had drifted out of the bars and gathered across the street in a loose swarm near the loading dock, casually waiting. Casually, like a spider.

We hung back on the sidewalk in front of the El Rancho, knowing something awful was going to happen and nothing else. In a while, the lone man emerged from the shed. At first, he seemed not to notice the packers or, at least, not to understand they meant the end of his life. But as he sensed trouble, he picked up his pace and scurried in a dusty quickstep toward the main road, aiming to skirt the knot of packers as he headed directly toward us. In eerie silence, the swarm flowed toward him, then massed around him, encompassing him like an amoeba enveloping its quarry. It was all in slow notion—no running, no shouting. Just a flowing swarm, silent and purposeful and inexorable. There was no commotion at all.

Then, as easily as it had gathered and moved, the swarm dissipated. Men drifted off in small clusters of two or three, like a cloud slowly breaking up. Soon everyone disappeared—all except one.

One man was left lying in the dirt in front of the loading dock. Everything was tan again. The dirt of the road. The chinos and dusty t-shirt wrinkled around his twisted body. His skin. Tan everywhere, except where maroon blotches marked the ebbing of the man’s lifeblood.

The Highway Patrol reappeared in due course. Who killed him, they wondered. The answer was easy: everybody.

They figured they couldn’t arrest everybody, and so their interest kind of drifted away, too. It seemed to be for the best. The important thing was to get a good harvest packed out. The strike was settled the next day. And the cantaloupe harvest was completed without further incident, except of course for the usual Friday-night jobs.

BIMINI

From my leather chair in Ted’s grand office atop the tall building he owned, I could see behind him the entire sweep of the Miami harbor and Biscayne Bay. Not the way I would have arranged it, his desk was situated so his back was toward the window and his focus was inward. I guess he felt no need to gaze with idle pride on the comings and goings of his huge fleet of cruise ships. Ted was all about taking care of business. That’s why Forbes listed him in the multibillionaire category.

In the midst of our conversation, Ted interrupted himself in mid-sentence. He stabbed a finger at his speakerphone, pressed his craggy face toward it, and growled “bodaydo”. He then pushed back and completed his sentence. I didn’t ask what that was about. My unspoken question was answered a few minutes later when a uniformed server entered and presented him with a tray arranged with silverware, a linen napkin, and a china plate bearing one perfectly baked potato.

“Sorry,” he grumbled with a trace of self-consciousness as he sawed into the potato. He added, “Pritikin,” and went on eating.

His second-in-command, Bill, interpreted while Ted swiftly completed his task. “Ted just got back from a month out at Pritikin in Santa Barbara. Changed his eating habits radically. He tries to eat a bunch of times during the day, just a small amount each time.”

Ted pushed away the tray and resumed. “So,” he said with finality, “we’ll have our next meeting on the boat tomorrow. Go out to Bimini. Fish on the way out, talk business at night. Fish on the way back next day. Do you know where to find the boat? I’ll tell you. No, wait.”

He rolled back from his desk, stood up, and beckoned me to the window. He pointed down to the yacht basin across the street. “See over there, there, right there, the round marina with all the boats? It’s there. You can see it from here. The big Hatteras. End of the third row of slips. See?”

A 74’ Hatteras is plenty big enough to see from ten floors up across the street.

The next morning early Mitch and I bounced down the dock toward Ted’s boat, toting small duffle bags with our gear for overnight. We looked forward to this kind of informal time with Ted, because to do our job right we really needed to get inside him. There’s just so far you can go in formal business setting, and then you need a different environment.

We needed to find out what Ted cared about most. He had retained us to dream up a way he could become a significant benefactor to Miami, his adopted city where he had build his fleet and his fortune. We had already learned about his growing up in Israel, about his military service there, about his early career in shipping in New York. And we knew all about the Big Idea that had made him a wealthy man: transforming the cruise-line industry from the exclusive province of the idle rich into the waterborne equivalent of Las Vegas and Atlantic City, a place where folks of modest means could frolic on “Love Boats” and wager a few coins in between their efforts to “get lucky” in other ways. He succeeded brilliantly.

But we knew that philanthropists need more than money. They need to have their hearts in the game. Otherwise, their benefactions will be transitory, unstable, even capricious—ultimately leaving both them and the causes they support without any long-term gratification. We had to find out what was hidden away in the heart of this gruff, quiet, modest, lovely man. We had to find out what he could care about deeply for a long time.

Ted welcomed us aboard and gestured toward a compact, solid man in his mid-40s with a face of granite and the stance of a boxer, poised on the balls of his feet. He had the look and feel of a snub-nosed .38 revolver. “You remember Jimmy”, he stated. We remembered Jimmy, Ted’s chauffeur and bodyguard. “Jimmy is the captain of this boat.”

We exchanged greetings. “Jimmy will tell you what to do,” Ted instructed, and with that Jimmy led us below to show us our staterooms and orient us to the boat. He stipulated safety procedures and showed us where the life jackets and other emergency items were stowed. As we passed a large cabinet in the main passageway, he rattled the oversized padlock on the door and said, “I’ll tell you about this later. We’ve got to get underway now.”

We cleared the harbor and Jimmy set the boat on autopilot, asking Ted to keep an eye out for other boats.

He turned to Mitch and me. “Okay, let’s go below and I’ll give you your assignments.”

Not understanding what lay ahead but dead certain we’d find out without asking, we clambered down the ladder from the flybridge steering station atop the cabin, crossed the cockpit, and followed Jimmy down the steps that led below. He halted in the passageway, in front of the floor-to-ceiling cabinet door with the massive lock. I now noticed the doors were reinforced with steel plate, clearly built keep something in or somebody out or both.

His sure hands flipped the lock open, lifted it clear of the hasp, and swung the cabinet door wide open. Wide open, like my mouth when I saw what lay strapped to the wall behind it.

An arsenal.

Semi-automatic machine-guns. Rifles. Shotguns. Pistols. Ammunition clips. Enough weaponry for a terrorist army. I swirled in confusion.

“Eliot.” It was Jimmy’s voice from somewhere afar, pulling me back from numbness. “Eliot,” he repeated. “This is your weapon,” he said unstrapping an AK-47 type weapon from its holder. “Here’s how it works.” Rolling it about with the casual ease of a pizza cook twirling dough, he quickly ran through the mechanics of operating it. Here’s the safety catch. Here’s how long to hold the trigger down for a single burst of fire. Here’s how you reload the clips of ammo.

“I’ve got you set up with triplets,” he went on, as though I might know what triplets are in a non-maternity setting. Jimmy detected no sign from me confirming that I had a clue what he was talking about. He went on. “The bullets in the clip are set up in cycles of three. First one is a tracer bullet, gives off a red streak. You can see the trail it leaves in the air. Next bullet is a hollow-point. It splatters when it hits, tears a big hole. One after that is armor-piercing. Goes right through metal. Then the cycle repeats. The whole clip’s set up that way. And here are your refill clips, stacked over here.”

Uh-huh.

“Your job is to go for the engine. Now don’t even try to aim the thing this way,” he said raising the weapon to his shoulder and sighting down the barrel the way I did with .22’s as a kid hunting rabbits and with M-1’s in army boot camp. “Waste of time. That’s what the tracers are for. Just follow the flight of the tracers and adjust your aim by what they tell you.”

Okay, he sees that I understand the technique. Now he aims me. “Go for the engine, like I said. Aim right at the waterline. Don’t worry about anything else. The rest of us will be taking care of that. You do your job right and that armor-piercing slug will trash their engine, leave them dead in the water.” He hands me the weapon, and I heft it and then hold it blocked against my hip like he showed me.

I get the technique, and I get the assignment. What I don’t get yet is who to shoot at, and why.

“Mitch.” It’s Jimmy again, shunting me to the side to contemplate my weapon. “Mitch, here’s your piece….”

I wait until Jimmy is all the way through his training session with Mitch who, I’d venture, has never physically handled a gun in his life until that moment. Then I ask him our question.

“Jimmy, who are we going to shoot at?”

“Pirates.”

“Pirates? Pirates?” I blurted. “Pirates? What the hell are you talking about?” Visions of Long John Silver, Peg Leg Pete, Sinbad, and Cap’n Hook tumble through my mind, instantly irrelevant.

“Look,” he said with practiced patience, “you’re in south Florida, right? Prime industry here is drugs. You know that. Right? Well, the biggest job in drugging is getting the stuff ashore here. Right? Okay, there’s lots of ways. Speedboats. We’ll see some of them tonight in Bimini. Container ships. Airplanes. But the feds are looking for them all the time. Cat and mouse all the time, on all the docks, all along the coast every night.”

He paused, hoping that something would become self-evident to Mitch and me by that point. But once again sensing our failure to grasp the obvious, he instructed us further.

“So one pretty good way is to sail right into the biggest marina in Miami in broad daylight on the biggest, most legitimate-looking yacht in the harbor.”

Mitch and I both smile at the audacity of the idea. We love clever strategy.

Jimmy broke our momentary spell of admiration. “Of course, they have to kill the people who own the yacht to get it.”

Oh shit.

“Happens all the time down here. Had one just last week. You’d be surprised.” I was.

“So we don’t take any chances.” He paused for emphasis and then spoke with steady intensity. “This is no joke.”

He turned his face slowly, like a swivel-mounted cannon, to aim it directly at me, held there, and then moved it to study Mitch, measuring our grasp of the situation and assessing our readiness to do our assignments if the time came. Apparently satisfied, he replaced the weapons in the cabinet, closed the doors, and pointedly laid the padlock aside on a counter, to permit instant access again. We rejoined Ted on the flybridge.

After bouncing across a particularly choppy Gulf Stream all morning, we were grateful to pull into the shelter of the shallow waters around Bimini Island in the Bahamas and enjoy a tranquil afternoon of fishing. Soon the refrigerated lockers aboard the boat were piled with vibrantly colored fish pulled from the crystal waters. We had some beauties for our dinner tonight, and Ted had his next week’s supply of Pritikin protein.

Jimmy wove the big Hatteras through the narrow, palm-lined channel into tight little Bimini harbor. There were a few other yachts like Ted’s snubbed into their slips, their creamy topsides and chrome rails glowing rosy in the late afternoon tropical sun. But most of the slips were occupied by a very different kind of boat.

Speedboats. Low, sleek, pointy, like daggers. But black. Every one. Dull black. Not a speck of chrome anywhere. Huge exhaust pipes, the size of cannons.

Ted gestured toward the speedboats. “These guys’ll make a little noise when they go out tonight, but it won’t last long. When you’re on the dock, don’t look at them. You understand? Just be sure they know you don’t want to know anything about them. You’ll be fine.”

So, what’s the deal with them?

Jimmy took over, practicing his wise-up-the-rubes routine with a remarkable lack of condescension. “Every one of those things is stuffed with drugs, all nicely packaged thanks to Sears.”

“What do you mean ‘thanks to Sears’?”

“Columbia’s probably the hottest market in the world for Kenmore trash compactors. Sell ‘em by the ton down there. That’s how they bale the stuff. Makes a nice neat bundle. They stack real tight.”

He nodded toward the speedboats. “Tonight these guys’ll all be making their run to the coast. You’ll hear them, okay, for sure. Thousand-horse engines, do ninety or a hundred once they get through the Gulf chop. Sounds like lndy when they fire ’em up, about midnight. Look at me!”

Huh? Then I realized both Mitch and I were ogling these sinister craft like a couple of kids watching a cobra. We dutifully redirected our focus to our teacher who was by now guiding the Hatteras into its slip. Dock boys took the lines and made her fast to the cleats. We climbed down from the flybridge and settled into the big chairs in the cockpit.

Jimmy continued our lesson. “Standard fee is twenty-five grand a run. One run a night, maybe a couple of runs a week. Big money. These guys making a couple of mill a year, so they don’t want anybody messing with their deal, you know? So we stay away from them, and they stay away from us. Works out fine.”

Yeah, I wondered, but what about the pirate stuff. Why wouldn’t they just take care of us tonight and cruise the Hatteras to Miami tomorrow?

“It doesn’t work like that,” Jimmy stipulated. “Too messy to take a boat right here in the marina, with a bunch of people around. I keep a watch out, sure, but I’m not too worried in here.”

That night over dinner we turned to business. We invited Ted to talk about his life, and he responded generously and with deep feeling. And when he spoke wistfully about the violin we knew we close to paydirt.

“I had a gift for it, I guess. Every day as a boy I would hurry through my chores so I could play, even for a minute or two, before somebody told me what to do next. I loved everything about it. Not just the sound. How it felt on my cheek, in my hand. How it smelled. You know the aroma that whispers up out of the chamber of a violin? Oh, so sweet! I guess I was gifted, because many people told me it was what I should do.”

“But not my father. He had other ideas. He was a big man. Not a giant. No, I don’t mean that. A big strong man. Strong ideas. He had a strong idea for me to be in shipping, like he was.”

“And then there was the army, of course. You grow up in Israel, you belong to the army. Those days, of course, we were at war all the time, every day, every minute. When there was no shooting, there was training for more shooting.”

“One day I was an adult and my violin was gone. I don’t know where it went. I never noticed.” He said it matter-of-factly, detached, like a mother describing many years later the crib death of a child. But his voice had shifted down a register, had taken on a wistful tone. I knew we were into the territory of unrequited dreams. We had found a buried treasure. Ted’s lifelong unspoken yearning could be transformed into a lifelong commitment to help others fulfill their own yearnings.

Mitch and I swung into action, imagining out loud all the gifted kids today whose dreams of being a performing artist are ill-formed or stifled or stillborn. Not all of them can or will become great artists, but surely many could be identified and supported early and continuously. What about setting up a program that would identify these kids and help them stay on track to live out their artistic gifts?

The dinner dishes were cleared away, and in the excited conversation that followed we dreamed up what is today called the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA). The NFAA conducts an annual talent search among all U.S. high schools, designating particularly gifted students as National Merit Scholars in the Arts. The most supremely talented of these become designated as Presidential Scholars in the Arts and have performed at special galas for them at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The NFAA also serves as a clearinghouse to match up talented youngsters with colleges and universities and schools of the arts which offer tens of millions of dollars in scholarship aid—money which prior to the NFAA often went begging for lack of a way for donors to connect up with deserving recipients.

In the afterglow of giving birth to a great idea, we were feeling very pleased with ourselves and satisfied with our work. We sipped our remaining wine and exchanged quiet words of eager anticipation.

Suddenly our reverie was pierced by a harsh, high-pitched mechanical whirring followed by the deep thunder of a huge engine firing up. Oh, of course, the speedboats. One after another, drivers cranked starters and thousand-horse engines rumbled to life with an animal growl, then subsided to a low rumble. The pilots slipped their mooring lines, jockeyed gently for position, and burbled out into the channel from Bimini harbor to the open sea. Once each boat cleared the end of the channel, drivers rammed the throttles home. The engines screamed to life—first a low roar, then an angry howl, finally volcanic, ear-shattering blasts that rose to a shriek like a jetliner on takeoff. Moments later the drivers were slamming across ocean waves into the Gulf Stream, hell bent for darkened inlets up and down the Florida coast where twenty-five thousand dollars in cash awaited each of them.

The violent sounds of the speedboats softened quickly in the deep humid air, and moments later, with nothing but the swish of the warm Bahamian breeze in the palm trees to fill the night, we were drifting off to sleep.

“First warning!” It was Jimmy, calling down from the steering station high on the big Hatteras’ tuna tower. Mid-day, and we were headed back to Miami. Jimmy was driving from up there, so he could see miles in every direction up and down the Gulf Stream.

Ted called up to him, “What’s up, Jimmy?”

“Radar lock-on. Got a boat on an intercept course with us, currently four point seven miles to port. Closing on us at a rate of eighteen knots. I adjusted course a while back to see if they’d adjust to keep on an intercept vector with us, and they did. Can’t see them yet ‘cause it’s too misty, but I’m going to hail them. Just stay on alert.”

It was not in any of us to “just stay on alert” so we clambered up the ladder to the steering station atop the tower where Jimmy stood. He showed us the radar tracking patterns he was monitoring, and indeed it appeared that this as-yet-unseen boat was coming for us. Jimmy reminded us that the “First warning” (stay on alert) would be followed by a “Second warning” (get out your weapons and ammo) before a “Battle stations” command (take aim and get ready to fire) and, God forbid, the ultimate: “Open fire!”

Ever the optimist, I was eager to believe everything was okay and that nothing violent was in the offing. My hopes rose when Jimmy got on the marine radio and hailed the other craft. When he ordered them to identify themselves, the answer came back quickly over the speaker: “This is the United States Coast Guard cutter ‘Ambrose’. We are on an intercept course and request that you stand by for inspection and possible boarding.”

I was reassured. Jimmy was unimpressed.

“You stand your distance until I have confirmed your identity and purpose,” Jimmy instructed firmly.

“Repeat,” returned the voice of the Coast Guard cutter, “we intend to intercept and inspect.”

“And I repeat,” returned Jimmy, intensity rising, “you keep your distance until I give you permission to approach. Give me the name, rank, and serial number of the captain of your ship.”

“Now you wait!” shot back an angry voice over the speaker. “This is the United States Coast Guard and we give the orders here.”

“I’ll decide for myself whether you are the Coast Guard or not,” shot back Jimmy. “If you are, you’ll be permitted to approach and give all the orders you want. If you aren’t, we’ll blow you out of the fucking water. Understand?”

My hopes for a tranquil mid-ocean encounter with the U.S. guardians of the coast were shriveling fast. I grabbed a pair of high-powered binoculars and scanned the horizon. The ship in question was now just in view through the haze and, sure enough, it was emblazoned with the dramatic red stripe of the U.S. Coast Guard.

“It’s okay,” I told Jimmy. “I see it, and it is a Coast Guard ship.”

“You mean,” he corrected dryly, “it is painted like a Coast Guard ship.”

Ouch.

To the ship: “I’m still waiting. The name, rank, and serial number of your captain. Now!”

The information came reluctantly out of the speaker like a short burst of farts.

“Okay. Stand your distance until I give you further instructions,” Jimmy ordered.

He changed channels on the radio phone and hailed the U.S Coast Guard station in Miami. After identifying himself and our boat, he gave our Loran reading and said: “I am being intercepted here in international waters by a boat claiming to be one of yours. Could be a pirate. You got somebody out here? If so, give me the name, rank, and serial number of the captain.”

The confirming information came back instantly. I went silly with relief. Jimmy accepted it matter-of-factly and switched channels back to the cutter, telling them to approach at will but to stand off at fifty yards.

The close-range encounter between the boats was gratifyingly anticlimactic, a simple exchange of unenthusiastic greetings along with some desultory mutual confirmation that one can never be too careful these days what with the drug runners and all. They sure kill a lot of people, don’t they. Yep. No compunctions at all. Well, okay, see ya later.

They headed back to patrol, and we headed on home.

I haven’t seen fit to voyage back to Bimini since then.

You really can have too much money.

RAGS TO RICHES TO WRETCHED

F. Scott Fitzgerald got it right: the rich really are different from you and me. I learned that lesson in instalments, each one taught point blank.

My first tutor was an extraordinary mountain of a woman named Beryl. Then a recent widow in her sixties, she reigned over an estate near the theological seminary where I was studying, and in due course I came to be introduced to her and secured a job working around her place.

All day long, Beryl surveyed the world and her minions from a huge overstuffed chair perched before a picture window in her sitting room. The chair was overstuffed in more ways than one. An enormous, pear-shaped hulk, Beryl probably topped 350 pounds, although to the eternal frustration of all her estate staff who had access to her personal quarters, we found the sliding counterweights on the doctor-style scale in her bathroom were always returned to zero after she used it.

Her vantage point from the highest knoll on the property let her savor the manicured acreage of her wooded grounds, the ancillary buildings, and her staff. Directly down the hill from her window stood the big brick garage, built for six cars below and staff quarters above. Her chauffeur and her hairdresser lived there, mostly waiting. Looking across the greensward to the left, she could monitor the activities of her long-time female companion, a literate and self-effacing type who occupied a charming five-room guest cottage and presented herself to Beryl in the big house on summons.

Imperious and demanding, Beryl amply embodied all the caricatured idiosyncrasies of the rich and powerful. As I was to learn, she could be brutal beyond feeling or measure. Yet she was also a woman of uncommon prescience and accomplishment.

Beryl had not been born to money. As a young girl from a modest mid-western farming family, she had been drawn to nursing in California where she promptly met, fell in love with, and married a young doctor. This was no ordinary doctor, however. His family was in the oil business, and they did pretty well at it. They did even better when they failed at it.

They had bought a huge tract of land shortly after the turn of the century, hoping to find a big oil strike there. No such luck. A few hits here and there dotted the tens of thousands of acres, but surely nothing like what they hoped for, and scarcely enough to justify the scale of their holdings.

Not to worry. Fast forward a decade and a half, to 1920 or so. Watch hordes of new people flock into the area. See important and glamorous new industries spring up right before your eyes.

Subdivide some of the land for residences, and give it a clever name, like a real estate development ought to have. Call it, hmmmm, let’s see, call it…”Beverly Hills”. Okay, that works. Now, open up another tract for commercial real estate development. Give it a main street and call it…how about “Wilshire Boulevard”.

Hey, this is neat! More fun than the oil business, and a whole lot more profitable!

So Beryl and her doctor husband were pretty well fixed, what with the money from the lots they sold as Beverly Hills and, later, Bel Air, but also with the income from the ground leases paid by hotels and offices built on the Wilshire Boulevard land they shrewdly decided to hold onto rather than sell outright.

A pathologist without the demands of office hours and being on-call, Beryl’s husband went about practicing his craft on a gentlemanly schedule that suited their frequent travels about the world, and Beryl grew into the role of grande dame at an early age. She learned her lessons well and, I would surmise, transformed herself smoothly from former farm girl and nurse to dowager princess in pretty short order. She couldn’t have become as imperious and unfeeling as she was when I knew her without having had a lot of practice.

But, then, the rich frequently do have to practice distancing themselves from the non-rich. We non-rich are so relentlessly enthralled by the lure of money that we will do almost anything to get close to it, to curry its favor, to bask in its glow, to wangle a portion of it for ourselves. The rich fend off an endless flow of supplicants—some who are easily dismissed bunglers, and some who are artists at teasing out the hidden weaknesses and appealing to the unguarded yearnings the rich struggle so hard to camouflage. Had I so much to defend, I am sure I too would have become so defensive.

As the year 1929 advanced inexorably toward The Crash, Beryl and her husband displayed both their prescience at business matters and their skill at protective social distancing. By the spring of 1929 they sensed that the stock market had run riot. They could feel no common-sense connection between the prices that stocks were commanding and the underlying values they represented. They made two decisions: get out of the market completely, and defend themselves against the inevitable.

And so, in April and May of 1929, they wrote a letter to practically everyone they knew. Family members, business associates, friends, employees. Their message was blunt and to the point: We think the market has gone berserk, they said. We fear a major crash. We are so convinced of this that we have totally removed ourselves from the stock market and have invested everything in land and in grocery stores. We strongly advise you to do the same.

Then came the cruncher: We know that many of you will not follow our advice, however. That is your privilege. But when the crash comes and you suffer losses, do not come to us for help. We are giving you—right now, in tendering our advice—the only help we will ever give you. If you reject the help we offer you on our terms, don’t expect something later on yours.

Their prescience and determination were even more finely honed in ensuing months. Literally on the eve of The Crash, in late September of 1929, they sensed that the end was near. They discreetly packed their steamer trunks, took their favorite maid in tow, and slipped away on a year-long, ‘round-the-world jaunt on a cruise liner—totally incommunicado. Only their personal attorney knew their itinerary and whereabouts during the frantic days and months that followed. On Black Monday, while acquaintances back home scrambled in panic and fellow passengers on the upper deck hastily abandoned ship to salvage something from devastated fortunes, Beryl and her husband snuggled in their deck chairs and enjoyed a well-earned respite from the cares of the world.

They were not idlers, however. He practiced his medicine conscientiously, as a medical school professor, and she set about taking charge of whatever she felt like.

The first thing she felt like taking charge of was their private yacht. A rather considerable yacht it was, indeed. One hundred ten feet from prow to fantail, accommodations for perhaps twenty cruising guests or an evening party of a hundred, replete with parlors and formal dining room, staffed by a fulltime captain and his crew of nine.

But, for Beryl, that was just the rub: the captain, not the owner, is technically in charge of a ship that size.

She made short work of that little inconvenience of nautical law. Off she went to the maritime academy. When Beryl returned many months later, she was sporting her own license as a fully qualified ship’s captain, authorized to command seagoing vessels far heftier than the family yacht. Henceforth and thereafter, the erstwhile captain was routinely demoted to first mate every time Beryl boarded ship.

Mind you, it wasn’t as though they ever really went anywhere on their yacht. Basically, it served as a floating ballroom on which they staged parties as it glided aimlessly about San Francisco Bay. All the captain had to do was keep it from bumping into anything that might spill their drinks. But Captain Beryl wasn’t about to suffer being subject to the control or authority of a mere hireling, ever. Not ever!

The same passion to be in complete charge took her to school again just a few years later. She and her husband had decided to move their primary residence from an elegant penthouse apartment in San Francisco to the bucolic preserves of Marin County across the Golden Gate. Shortly after they began working with an architect, she realized that she would be heavily dependent on the architect’s ideas and judgment, and that the final plans could bear his imprint more than hers.

Not ruddy likely. Off she went again, this time for almost two years of architectural studies. Moving plans delayed, new site lying fallow, she steadily plowed ahead, mastering not only the more conspicuous elements of room layout and exterior elevation design but also the inner stuff of substructural engineering and other arcana.

In fact, she revelled in the more hidden assets of her finished product. For starters, it was a deceptive house. By notching the house into the backside of a high knoll, it appeared from the road to be only a long, low, one-story country cottage. Expansive, to be sure, but not impressive or in any way ostentatious. The rough redwood shingles on the exterior walls helped further to camouflage both its size and the elegance within. But that was only the half of it. Below, and visible only from the rear of the estate—the part where only authorized, controlled eyes could see—lay another entire layer of house. No passer-by would ever suspect that the demure façade visible from the road masked a labyrinth of panelled rooms which held, among other things, 7,000 priceless leather-bound volumes of literature and rare first editions, a full-sized pipe organ, 2,900 bottles of the world’s finest wines, museum-quality antiques and custom-woven carpets.

There were other hidden assets, of a more practical nature. With an earthquake fault nearby, she created a core structure for the house that was a monumentally overbuilt cage designed to withstand literally any force: walls and floors of steel-reinforced concrete twelve to sixteen inches thick, all bound together by a redundant steel girder system which cradled and boxed in the entire works. An earthquake might toss the entire structure one way or the other, as a whole, but it could certainly never break off any part of it or collapse anything.

Control. Always control, even over nature.

Beryl didn’t have control over predators, however. And so she defended herself against them as best she could. Each night, she retired to her bedchamber barricaded behind eight—that’s right, eight—layers of locks. Her fearful recessional began with the door between her sitting room and the outer hallway: deadbolt, chain, and bar. Next came the door between her bathroom and the sitting room, even though the bathroom had no exterior openings: it still got a deadbolt and a slide bolt. Finally, the door between her sitting room and her bedchamber: deadbolt and two bars.

These were just the physical barriers. The property was also laced with a fretwork of electronic devices destined to terrorize her with their alarms. For they were constantly being triggered by innocent deer tranquilly meandering across the grounds at night. In all the years she lived there, no bona fide burglar ever tripped an alarm to make her nightly anguish worthwhile. But she died a thousand deaths awaiting his arrival, and practiced her fright response a hundred times or more when Bambi’s kinfolk nibbled moist grasses in the moonlight.

I was fascinated by Beryl, of course. I have always had a moth-and-flame fascination with wealth. And I had never met anyone like her before (and haven’t since). As we grew to know one another, she began to take an interest in me and my wife, then pregnant with our first child-to-be. We spent occasional evenings playing bridge with Beryl and her companion, and—as impecunious graduate students with no money for entertainment—we welcomed the chance to accompany them to concerts and plays from time to time. Soon it became clear that I was one of her “favorites”.

Shortly thereafter it became clear what that meant. A construction crew arrived one day and began clearing a site down by the brook that traversed the estate. Within days, a foundation was laid and walls began going up. A cottage began to take shape.

None of the dozen or so regular employees on the estate knew its purpose, and Beryl delighted in withholding her intent. Probably only I suspected what was going on: she was building it as a home for us and our about-to-be newborn baby.

I never mentioned my hunch, of course. What could be more presumptuous—or more embarrassing if wrong. But one night at the bridge table, with appropriately understated fanfare, she announced to my wife and me that we were moving into the cottage
.
She did not ask if we wanted to, of course. She was a controlling woman, and she was fully in control. She knew this genial young couple were not about to decline so magnanimous a gesture which had been so many months in the making, before our very eyes.

But even then, as young and naive as we were, we sensed a caution. And the strands of the intended web were revealed in swift succession, as soon as we had moved in. She would be pleased to have us spend evenings with her on a regular-basis, rather than on random occasions. That would be alright, wouldn’t it? And so we committed to a weekly bridge game—but drew the line at a second night every week.

Next came the added-security gambit. It would be alright, wouldn’t it, if she wired an intercom between her bedroom and ours, so that she could call us in an emergency. What?! An intercom in our bedroom? We mustered all the courage and diplomacy we could, and declined. She took our demurrer with grace enough, but we began to suspect that she had recorded one strike on our scorecard.

The second strike came with our refusal to take over the evening doggie ritual conducted for the benefit of the bowels of her matched brace of dachshunds named Schnickel and Fritz. Currently the unwelcome chore of her longsuffering, hapless chauffeur, this little ceremony was nothing we wanted any part of. Night after night, it never varied. Night after night, it went like this:

The chauffeur presented himself in Beryl’s sitting room prepared for duty at precisely 7:30 P.M., about fifteen minutes after she had finished her dinner. Beryl would be wedged into her oversized overstuffed chair, flanked on either side by the sleek dachshunds. Each lay in the puffy crevasse between the arm of the chair and the soft bulge of her body, port and starboard, like a pair of stuffed-dog bolsters.

On command, the chauffeur advanced on Beryl, bearing two Milk Bone dog biscuits. Like an acolyte assisting a priestess, he would present her with one of the biscuits. Now, Milk Bone dog biscuits are bone-shaped—a shaft, with a double-bulge at either end, like Mickey Mouse ears. Beryl then proceeded with great precision to snap first one, then the other, of the two ears at one end of the biscuit. These were both fed, one at a time, to whichever of the two dogs seemed to merit her initial attention that evening. That done, the second biscuit was properly presented, ear removal performed, and the feeding of the other dog completed.

Next, it was time to get their bowels limbered up. From the chauffeur’s satchel came the tool of agitation—a six-foot string with a fist-sized flannel bag of catnip tied to one end. Again on command, he began swinging it like a lariat, round and round over his head, in the middle of the room. At that, Schnickel and Fritz both sprang over the heaving mounds of their mistress’ frontside and hit the floor running. They chased the catnip frantically ‘round its orbit, around and around, their claws digging desperately into the fine carpet in a scrabbling effort to control their centrifugal force as they whirled circle after circle under the flying catnip bag. Eventually, Beryl sensed in her own ineffable way that their little bowels were appropriately stirred up to make a trip outside fruitful. A clap of her hands brought dogs and chauffeur to an equally obedient halt. He returned the paraphernalia to his satchel, put the dogs on leashes, and promptly led them outside.

But it wasn’t over. Anxious minutes passed, Beryl still sitting in her chair, the two semi-earless Milk Bone dog biscuits on the chairside table next to her. She listened intently. After an eternity, the sound of the outside door’s opening was followed by the frantic clickity-click of dachshund toenails scratching for traction on the marble flooring as they scrambled to race each other back into her presence. Moments later, Schnickel and Fritz burst through the door and scaled her lap. The chauffeur followed dutifully in their wake, coiled leashes in one hand, report pre-articulated in his mind.

“Well?” Beryl demanded. Both dogs studied the chauffeur’s face intently, knowing he held some influence over what came next in their lives. What he then delivered was a more graphic description of what had just issued from each of their behinds than I care to rehearse here. Failing the experience firsthand, few could imagine that such a description could go on for several minutes—per dog. It can. Simply be assured that no feature of color, consistency, amount, or aroma was left unremarked.

He also assured her that they were properly wiped.

If Beryl liked what she heard about a given dog, she proceeded to dismember the remainder of the Milk Bone dog biscuit—first an ear at a time, then by snapping the shaft into small bits—and fed it to him. One whose fecal report disappointed her clearly had not earned such kindness and was sent to bed forthwith.

You will understand why I declined to assume responsibility for evening dog duty. Even though it clearly meant strike two.

I soon got a foretaste of what lay in store for those who accumulate three strikes on Beryl’s scorecard. I don’t know what Schnickel and Fritz did that earned them strike one and strike two. Presumably those offenses predated my tenure on the place. They had been her constant companions for six or seven years, and I’m sure no sins of omission or commission escaped her notice. But I was witness to strike three and what it meant to be thumbed out in her game.

One lovely spring day while Beryl was elsewhere, a bird flew into her sitting room through an open French door. Catching the spirit of the moment, the dachshunds went into their whirling dervish dance, chasing the bird around and around as though it were the spontaneous resurrection and ascension of the catnip bag. A wonderful time was had by all. But in the celebratory excitement of the moment, one or the other of the dogs trickled some pee onto the rug as he spun his circles around the room.

Beryl knew what to do about that. As I was preparing to run various errands about town, she summoned me and asked that I drop the dogs by the veterinarian’s office on my rounds. Not an unusual request, as they were conscientiously cared for with shots and treatments on a rigid schedule of maintenance. I gave it no further thought.

Until, as I was leaving the vet’s office, he handed me their leashes. Normally, he kept them there until the dogs were retrieved. Couldn’t he just hold them until then, like always, I asked. He informed me tonelessly that the dogs wouldn’t be needing them any more.

And they didn’t.

All evidence that any dogs had ever lived in Beryl’s house had been removed by the time I returned. Not a trace. Gone. No reference was ever made to them. Their names were never spoken again. They had never existed.

I ceased to exist shortly thereafter. For Beryl, anyhow. Funny how one person’s home run ball can look to another person like a third strike.

A wonderful new scholarship was endowed later that spring at the theological seminary, and it was the stuff enlightened dreams are made of. The brainchild of a recent seminary graduate, these funds were donated by the members of his church—in Beverly Hills, ironically—with one single stipulation: the recipient could not hold any outside job. Their intent was to free a student during those few precious years to concentrate exclusively on the theological quest that brought him or her to the seminary in the first place.

I was the very fortunate inaugural recipient of this scholarship. Despite the fact that Beryl was an active member of a seminary-related church and made major capital contributions to it, somehow I knew that my good news would not feel like good news to her. I knew by then that Beryl could not tolerate what she could not control. I did not, however, expect her response to be quite as abrupt as it was.

When I finished explaining the nature of the scholarship and what it would mean to me, and offered to pay rent on the cottage, she spoke to me the only six words I was ever again to hear from her lips:

“Be off the place by sundown.”

BUYING YOUR OWN WORLD

I took my postgraduate training in How the Rich are Different in my late thirties. Still somewhat captivated by the allure of big money at that point in my life, I found myself the proprietor of a consulting company organized to help philanthropists find more effective ways to give away money. Our clients were foundations, corporations, and a few extraordinarily wealthy individuals—people with net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars and more.

These poor people were born to their money, and that is why I refer to them as poor people. Being born to money, I was to discover, is a bewildering hereditary condition which all too few of the born-rich survive with health intact and grace to spare. To be sure, I have known and worked with some whose lives are a welcome blessing to all they touch. But I have also come to know many more who spend their days seemingly disabled by an invisible ennui that defies diagnosis. I have tried to understand what this affliction is all about. I think I have a few clues.

Lesson #1 was that really rich people do not have to live in the world as it comes; they have the power to remake it according to their own preferences.

One of my clients spent a lot of time—and a bucket of money—trying to get his various houses just right. So what? Lots of us get wrapped up in fussing with the details of a remodelling job. True, but few of us would carry on the following dialogue with the architects planning an extensive remodelling of an already-magnificent mansion.

“I want the bathtub in the master suite to run east and west now, Harry.”

“That’s not possible, Mr. Trenchant.”

“It is possible.”

“Not really, I’m afraid it isn’t. I’ve studied the situation from all angles, and we just can’t make it work. It has to remain where it is, north and south.”

“Harry, I want it to run east and west.”

“I know you do, Mr. Trenchant. But I’m telling you, we have studied every possibility. Because it is so huge and deep, and with all the additional structural support we need under it to bear the enormous weight when it’s full and the engineering required to service the Jacuzzi ports and the temperature control mechanisms and all the rest, and because it already is recessed into the ceiling of the formal dining room below, we just don’t have any way we can turn it without creating further sacrificing the remaining floor joists which would then require more bracing mechanisms that would intrude into the dining room ceiling space. You remember the drawings I prepared to show you what that intrusion would do—it would be intolerable.”

“No, Harry. You are wrong. I’ll tell you what is intolerable: You are not listening to me. I said I want the bath tub to run east and west. It will run east and west. If the only way you can make my bathtub run east and west is to lift the entire house off its foundations and turn the whole damned thing 90 degrees, then that is what I am telling you to do.”

And he was dead serious.

He proved that just a few months later. On a different house. My client purchased a gigantic waterfront “cottage” on Nantucket, one of those turn-of-the-century shingled mansions with a dozen bedrooms and soaring, airy main rooms swept by ocean breezes fore and aft. This big old ark of a place was ringed by deep porches and crowned with a dozen or more dormers sprouting from the wonderfully erratic roofline. My client knew he’d just love it, once he spent a million or two to remodel it, add a pool and tennis court, and stuff like that.

Oh, and one other thing. Improve the view.

Now, it’s not easy to improve the view once you own a waterfront mansion with nothing between you and the open ocean but sand. Every window on the ocean side of the house looked out on nothing but lovely rolling beach and endless miles of ocean clear to the horizon.

Ah, but what about the side windows. They did not have unobstructed views. Uh-uh. About two hundred feet to the left was another big old “cottage”, and there was yet another on the right, farther away but also clearly in sight from the side windows.

No problem. Buy them and plow them under.

Never mind that the price of this view-improvement project would be rather dear, Nantucket waterfront mansion prices being what they are. And what about the precious personal histories of those places, about their individual architectural significance, and about their place in the overall architectural ecology of the entire beachfront?

The owners of those neighboring places didn’t think to ask those questions at first. When approached by my client’s agent with an offer they presumably couldn’t refuse, its being roughly double the going market value, the owners figured this was a guy with more money than brains trying to create a multi-mansion compound for his extended family. They walked halfway into the deal before they figured out that what he had in mind was laying waste to their precious homes to gain a bit better peek at the water from his side windows. They broke off the negotiations.

But people with enough money and determination usually find some way to get what they want, I have learned.

My client got what he wanted by picking up his entire mansion—all seven thousand square feet of it—and marching the thing fifty or sixty feet closer to the water. Just far enough to ensure that the view from his side windows swept clear of the offending houses down the beach on either side.

Lots of rich people spend lots of time and money fussing with their houses. Not all of them have the visual imagination of my client, however, and need some help envisioning the finished result. An architect-builder friend recently completed a fifteen million dollar mansion for an owner who needed some help. Looking at floor plans, elevations, and even artists’ renderings of the place left her stymied. She wanted to know what it would feel like to actually be in the rooms of the house. And so she asked to have the interior of every single room in the house built in mock-up, like a Hollywood set, so she could experience its size and proportions. It worked.

My friend leased a huge warehouse where a team of architects, carpenters, and theatrical set designers would create a facsimile of, say, the main dining room.

“Oh,” she would fret as she spun through the space. “I don’t like this at all! Could you make the ceiling lots higher?” And so it would be rebuilt “lots higher”, and then “a little lower”, until it approximated perfection.

Week after week, room after room, each interior space was mocked up and then re-mocked up repeatedly, until she felt it was just right. Then, and only then, was the architect free to try to fit all these rooms together into a Chinese-puzzle type mass that resembled a whole house and to design an exterior to wrap the whole bundle in. He figures it nearly doubled the cost of the whole project.

In “fairness”, it must be said that you and I cannot fathom what life is like amidst so much money. These people are drowning in money, beyond all comprehension. It simply has no significance for them.

Try to imagine it for a moment. The likes of you and me carry a wish list around in our minds—all the quality-of-life improvements we work for day in and day out. Fix up the house, or get a bit better one across town. New car or two. A boat. A summer cottage. Travel. Some new clothes. What else? Private schools for the kids, maybe. Hmmmm. Then,what? Okay, maybe your own airplane.

Now, place yourself in the midst of the income stream some of these people cope with. My client with the penchant for moving houses gets a check for about four hundred thousand dollars of spending money—every month. This has been going on for thirty years, since he got out of college. Put yourself in his place for a moment. First month, you get the house you’ve always wanted. Well, okay, maybe it even takes the first two or three months checks, hey, even four if you have grand tastes. But remember, then it’s all paid for.

So come month five, you still have the whole four hundred grand to get rid of. Buy that boat. Next month, the summer cottage. That’ll take care of months five and six. Let’s see, what are we down to? Clothes. Travel. Jeez, can’t spend four hundred thousand on that in just one month. Better get the plane, too. Naw, I don’t really want a plane, for God’s sake. Too many people get killed in these private planes, and I want to stick around to enjoy all this stuff. Okay, an extra car—a really exotic one. Whew! Took care of month number seven.

Then here comes month eight. Another four hundred thousand. For crying out loud, what the hell am I supposed to do with this stuff, anyhow. I’m tired of all this running around shopping. Just stick it away somewhere, and I’ll figure out what to do with it when I get back from my trip to the South Pacific.

Two more checks are waiting for you when you get back. You have fallen woefully behind, and it’s starting to pile up now. Dammit. Now each month’s check is starting to include the income on the unspent money, too, so instead of four hundred thousand a month, it’s up to four twenty. Soon it’ll be four fifty and then five hundred, if you’re not careful. Better get hustling, or you’ll never catch up.

Look, we’ve only scratched the surface. Ten months. Just ten months, and already it’s a problem. Doesn’t sound so silly any more, does it. Fast forward a couple of years, or a decade or two, and you can begin to understand why “money is no object” to people who are buried under it.

This perspective helps explain the ludicrous conversation that took place over cocktails and dinner at the home of super-rich relatives of one of my super-rich clients. There were to be five of us that evening—my clients, husband and wife, and one other couple, our hosts. Our hosts were entertaining us in their home in Florida, a tasteful and understated one-story pink stucco, tile-roofed place that meandered over manicured lawns behind forbidding walls around the perimeter of the property. Once through the gates, we were in an expansive courtyard and parking area. Our hosts’ automobiles were arrayed there, one for every conceivable occasion. About nine in all, they included a Mercedes stretch limousine, exotic sports cars like a Lamborghini and an Aston-Martin roadster, four-wheel drive wagons and pickups, and “personal” cars—his and hers Rolls Royce convertibles.

I noticed that they were lined up according to their license plate numbers—WJE-I, WJE-II, WJE-III, and so on. My first impression was of orderliness, all lined up that way. It wasn’t until later that it also dawned on me that those license plates represented one more illustration of a rich person exerting control, at the most subtle and sickeningly petty level, over everyone in their orbit. What I realized was that all the cars, including the one he customarily drove, bore only her initials WJE. You
guess which one of them was born to the wealth.

Everyone chatted amiably about nothing in particular for a while, experimenting with ways to work me—the fifth person and unfamiliar to the hosts—into the conversational scheme for the evening. But soon the four of them, people who saw each other often, settled into their accustomed badinage and I sat back to observe.

“How was the flight down?” the host asked my clients. We had flown down to their Florida place from our homes in New Jersey in their private jet.

“Smooth, no weather problems, once we got up to altitude. But I swear I’m going to fire that damned pilot if he does that steep pullout one more time. I’ve already warned him.” Right after takeoff, our pilot had stood the hot jet right on its tail and rocketed up at an extreme angle until we hit cruising altitude. “It just kills my damned ears. I’ve told him time and again. That boy’s on borrowed time.”

“Yeah, that’s the trouble with these things,” countered our host, who knew what he was talking about. He owned the twin of my clients’ plane. “Pilots don’t get much chance to drive anything like these screamers, and when they do they’re like a kid with a hot rod.”

“Didja see they’ve just announced the new models? Two of ‘em. Wonder if they’ll be much faster.”

“I dunno. They both look pretty strong.”

“Which one you gonna get?”

“Well, I haven’t decided yet. Which one are you gonna get?”

Wait a minute, I thought. Something funny is going on here. What is it? I’ve got it: there’s an assumption in the air. The assumption is that they are both going to buy new planes. Period. They are not wondering whether to buy a new plane. New plane time. Despite the fact that I knew my clients’ plane was only a year old and figured the same was true for my hosts’. This is a done deal. The only question on the floor is, which model?
Our hosts fetched some sales literature they had on the two new planes. The ensuing discussion was matter of fact, touching on matters of performance, luggage capacity, cruising speed, range, and the like. Since each couple intended to fit out the interiors to their custom designs and specifications, there was nothing to talk about there. Price was mentioned, but only because it cropped up as someone was reciting from the literature. One model was $3.7 million, the other $4.2 million.

We have already established that price is no object in these circles, so what criteria will prevail?

Well, how about environmental responsibility?

Twenty minutes or so into the discussion of the new airplanes, someone uncovered the fact that one of the models—the more expensive one, as it turned out—got better fuel mileage than the other. About ten percent better, as I recall.

“Well,” someone else chimed in. “That settles it. In these days, I think it’s really important that we all do what we can to help decrease pollution. And, besides, what with all this dependence on foreign oil, we’ve got to do our part.”

All nodded, felt good, and moved on to the next subject.

Which was horses. Race horses, of course.

“I thought you were going to buy that big brute from Danny Mercer—the two year old that’s knocking off everybody. Is that deal still on?”

“Naw.”

“How come? That horse could be another Derby winner for you, didn’t you say?”

“That’s for sure. But Danny pissed me off.”

“What’d he do?”

“All along we were talking about three mil. Three mil. That was the price all along. Then, last minute, he’s suddenly talking about three-five.”

“Even then, that horse is pretty much a steal, isn’t it? I mean, Danny’s strapped.”

“Sure it is. But he pissed me off, so I’m not going to do it.”

We moved in to dinner in the smaller of two dining rooms, an intimate oval room with subdued lighting and an elegant oval table set for five. The walls were graced with several paintings scaled beautifully to the size of the room. I suspected, then confirmed on closer look, they were originals of great beauty—Manet, O’Keeffe, Monet, Modigliani.

We menfolk took to talking of cars, while the women were into a different subject between them. As our talk turned to classics, the question arose of whether the last Cadillac Eldorado convertible manufactured, back in the late ‘70s, would qualify as a classic someday.

“Hon,” our host interrupted his wife. She listened. “Cadillac Eldorado convertible. Don’t we have one of them?”

She puzzled for a moment, murmuring, “Cadillac Eldorado convertible.”

“You know,” he pushed. “Big wide thing. Front wheel drive. You know. Don’t we have one of them.”

“Would it be gold?” she wondered.

“Yeah! That’s it. The gold one. Yeah. We do have one,” he confirmed to us with satisfaction. “I knew it.”

Back to her. “Hon, where is that thing, anyhow?”

She thought for a few seconds. “Squaw Valley.”

“Yep,” he returned to us. “That’s right. I knew we had one of them. It’s in Squaw Valley,” he repeated with the satisfied finality of someone who had just scooped a roomful of stymied competitors at Trivial Pursuit.

I somehow had the feeling we could have played the same game with different homes they owned around the world and witnessed a comparable degree of recall difficulty.

The following morning, during breakfast back at my clients’ house where I had been their guest for three days, the following exchange between them caught my attention.

Asked he, “What are you going to do today, honey?”

She replied, “Oh, I don’t know. I think maybe I’ll do a little shopping.”

Nothing remarkable about that. Except for the fact that I suddenly realized that they had exchanged exactly the same lines for each of the three days I had been with then. And now, on the third repetition, I knew without doubt that these lines must be exchanged virtually every day of their lives.

And then lesson #2 dawned on me: this is their vocation—to buy things. I mean “vocation” literally, as a “calling”. That is what people like them are called to do: spend money buying things. For many of them, buying things is literally all they can think to do all day long. It is, by default, what they conclude they are supposed to do.

This is the curse of inherited money, that bewildering hereditary condition which, as I said at the outset, painfully few born-rich survive with deep health and abundant grace. They are born into in a gravitational vortex which constantly pulls them into a default vocation, that of mere money-spender. And the conditions of their growing up sometimes deprive them of the resourcefulness to swim out of that undertow.

Consider how profoundly different the very fabric of life is for them, compared to the rest of us. Our lives are laced through with a deep structuring we did not invent but rely on, unconsciously, to give form and priority to our everyday activity. The warp and the woof of this fabric are time and money. We live out our days making decisions at the eternal intersection of these two, in a never-ending dance of negotiation between them.

The negotiation begins in childhood and shapes our entire view of the world and how we will conduct ourselves in it. Because we do not come pre-equipped with a lifetime supply of money, we know from our earliest days that we must earn what we will have to spend. Earning money is an activity, and any activity requires time. Roughly, the more money we decide to earn, the more time we need to spend earning it.

Earning money also requires practice. We get better at it as we go along. Early on, raw resourcefulness helps. When the leaves fall or the snow flies, we take rake or shovel in hand to sell our services to our neighbors. Later, we make more subtle judgments: a Kool-Aid stand perched in front of our house is fine, but we notice that there is twice as much car and foot traffic at the intersection, where two streets meet down at the end of the block, so we move the stand down to the corner. Our first lesson in business strategy.

And on it goes. By the time we emerge from high school and college, we have experimented with dozens of pursuits and have sorted out the ones which return the best combination of financial reward and psychological gratification. We are on our way, weaving ourselves into the time/money fabric according to our particular predisposition. Teachers opt for less time and less money: a 38-week work year and a level of pay that is shameful in our wealthy society. They are nurturing qualities in themselves and their students they value more highly than money.

By contrast, many in other professions, traders and lawyers and consultants, routinely work 70-hour weeks year ‘round and make five or ten times as much as teachers. No matter. The point is simply that we are all constantly making trade-offs as we try to improve our position and maximize our gratifications in the overall picture, always searching for a more favourable crossover point at the time/money intersection. This perpetual renegotiation silently, persistently shapes our lives, every day.

But what if you woke up tomorrow and the pursuit of money were not there to define the primary purpose for spending your time that day? More to the point, what if it had never been there. What if you had never, in your entire life, needed to think about earning money.

Precisely how would you have gone about deciding how to spend your time?

What criteria would have guided you? Would you have shaped your life around the activity that you found most “fun”’? Most intellectually stimulating? Most physically challenging? Most socially gratifying? Most spiritually rewarding? Most ego-boosting?

How long could you stay interested? How long can you stand to be on vacation, before you itch to get back into action, doing the things you are counted on to do, doing the things you have learned to do well, doing the things you and others value you for?

The born-rich wake up each morning with a burden you and I will never have to shoulder: trying to figure out what to do with their lives that day. I say this in genuine sympathy; the burden is real, it is vexing, and many of them have been deprived of the benefit of earlier trials to strengthen their ingenuity. For us, the day is decided: keep on keeping on, trying to make that time/money equation as satisfying as possible. We’ve had lots of practice, and we’ve gotten pretty resourceful in the process.

But for these poor people, it’s the umpteenth day of vacation and, “Didn’t we do that already? Isn’t there something else we can try?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe do a little shopping. Or move the house.”

GO FIGURE

His parents were rich. Their mansion on Van Ness Boulevard was one of Fresno’s most impressive, occupying a full block. Over the years as a kid in the neighborhood I progressively walked, bicycled, and eventually drove past their place, craning my neck each time to catch a glimpse of the gravel parking yard through their pillared gates where a king’s ransom of expensive cars were scattered about.

Their son, Robbie, got a Maserati for his sixteenth birthday. That was a big deal in Fresno in the 1950’s. Only a Ferrari had more cachet, and nobody doubted that if he’d have preferred a Ferrari, he could have had that instead.

Funny thing was, his having a Maserati wasn’t enough to make him popular. Usually, a really cool car added significantly to the social status of kids at Fresno High School, exerting an irresistible gravitational pull on us wannabes who would cluster about the one who owned it, seeking reflected auto-glory. But somehow people remained indifferent to Robbie.

On his eighteenth birthday, he gained control of a three million dollar trust fund. Three million, at a time when his parents’ mansion might have sold for about $125,000 and his father’s new Cadillac convertible cost $4,000. It was big money, and he was no longer the child of rich people. He was himself a bona fide rich person.

When he graduated from Fresno High a few months later, he joined the Navy for four years.

That may tell you why, even with his best-car-in-school going for him, something else was lacking that offset even that seemingly insuperable appeal in car-crazy California of the ‘50s. Rich enough to do anything in the world. And he decides on four years as an enlisted man in the Navy.

Gets discharged eventually, then marries his high school girlfriend. They bought a mansion in Pebble Beach, perhaps the ritziest neighborhood in California at the time. He soon got bored sitting in his mansion in Pebble Beach and applied for a job, which he got. Next day, he was pumping gas for a living at the Chevron station on Ocean Avenue in Carmel.

He apparently sensed that driving to work from Pebble Beach in his Maserati or whatever other exotic car he owned at the time might create an awkward situation, so he bought a nondescript gray Plymouth coupe of indeterminate vintage and commuted in that instead.

He happily pumped gas, pulled dipsticks to check oil levels, and washed windshields all day long for a year or so until one fateful day when he inadvertently left for home after work without picking up his paycheck. His employer, the owner of the station, felt terrible that Robbie might have to go through the weekend bereft of his precious wages and so hopped in his car to deliver the check to Robbie’s home.

He knew that Robbie lived in Pebble Beach, but so did other domestic workers and family retainers quartered in lodging over the garage or in the servants’ wing of various mansions dotted throughout Del Monte Forest and lining the fairways of ocean-front golf courses on the peninsula. He knocked on the front door of the imposing, Spanish-style 18-room house at the address Robbie had given on his employment information, hoping to be directed to his gas-pumper’s quarters.

When Robbie answered the door himself and was revealed moments later as the lord of the manor, the employer suffered a painful spasm of cognitive dissonance he resolved the only way he could think of at the time: he fired Robbie on the spot.

Realizing that his wealth might at some future date occasion a similar episode of job insecurity, Robbie resolved to become self-employed. So he bought a small business, and last time I saw him was happily spending his days cutting up squid into small chunks to sell as bait to the people who rented rowboats from him at his little shack on the wharf in Monterey Bay.

How the Other Half Lives

The First Presbyterian Church of Princeton where I worked in the 60s was full of rich people. Not everyone was rich, of course, but many were. Some inherited their money, others earned it as captains of industry and finance in New York City. I was responsible for social-action projects and for education at the church. Their wealth was helpful when I wanted to put the arm on somebody for money to buy a building in Trenton to create a day-care center for impoverished single mothers so they could work. Or to generate scholarships for summer camp for inner-city kids. Or to secure commitments for home mortgages in red-lined neighborhoods.

But their wealth was not unreservedly helpful to their teenage sons and daughters with whom I also worked as youth advisor. Much has been written about the sense of “entitlement” such kids harbor. This entitlement is self-referential, however, as in I am entitled to certain privileges. The flip side of that is that others are presumably not so entitled. Such disparity is the way of the world, they think, if and when they think about the flip side at all.

Since many of these young people would be riding the escalator to positions of influence in their adulthood—many coming to rest well above the positions they might have attained from a different starting point—it seemed necessary to conduct some lessons in empathy for the have-nots. So I invited three of them to join me for a walk in another’s shoes.

Their fathers were all rich. One owned a large architectural and construction business, developing office parks, hospitals, colleges, and other major facilities. Another was the Chairman of the Board of a household-name corporation in New York City. The third was a financier, senior partner in one of the most prestigious Wall Street banking houses.

Their sons, seniors in a private high school, had never lacked for anything in their lives. But they were immediately intrigued when I invited them to join me for a few days living on welfare.

Living on welfare? What do you have in mind, they wondered. Is this a game? An experiment? Slumming? They had heard chatter from adults of their acquaintance, sneering at people on welfare and exchanging ain’t-it-awful tales of “welfare cheats” they’d heard about on TV.

I explained that I had arranged for us to occupy a tenement apartment located in the lower east side of New York City, a dingy and downtrodden neighborhood. I had calculated how much money each of us would have if we were living on the typical welfare stipend. That would be all the money we would be allowed to have during our stay. We would have to make do with whatever that would permit us to buy and do. Are you game? They were.

The rich usually avoid the poor. Few children of the rich have stepped over the slumped body of a sleeping, drunken street person to reach the battered, graffiti-splattered door to their domicile. But they did, two weeks later. The metal door, buckled from too many attempts to open it without the benefit of a key, yielded with a screech as the twisted rim scraped the door jamb. The billows of stench hit us first, even before we could see anything in the darkened entry hall.

“Shit!” yelped one of the boys. It was an exclamation, not a declaration, but it actually served for both. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, it became evident that someone had used a corner of the entry hall to empty their bowels.

“I don’t know about this,” another said as we edged around the feces and tested the first stair. It creaked but held weight, and so we stepped gingerly upward, unsure of gait and resolve. Without benefit of electric bulbs, we groped upward in the dim fall of light sifting down from a grimy skylight above the stairwell until we arrived at the third-floor hallway. The ratty door to 3A, our new home, was just before us on the landing.

My contact person in New York who had secured the apartment for us had seen to it that it would have rudimentary cooking utensils and cleaning equipment. Otherwise empty, it would suffice as a place to spread our sleeping bags during our sojourn there.

Mark made a beeline for the broom leaning against the counter. With industry I’m sure his parents never witnessed at home, he swept passionately. Cockroaches scurried to escape his almost-manic slashing with the broom, as he stirred up swirling eddies of dust and redistributed whatever dirt had taken up residence there over the decades. The others immediately fell to washing the kitchen utensils and plates. Again, the scene would certainly have amused their parents, unaccustomed to such spontaneous eagerness for KP duty. But these kids were instinctively mistrustful that anything in that shabby locale—even if supplied by one of Eliot’s colleagues—could be clean enough to touch their food.

Food. Oh, food. Hmmm. What shall we do for food tonight. Evening was already falling, and our farewell lunch in Princeton was now a long time ago. Better go out and do some grocery shopping.

“Okay, guys,” I said, “here’s the deal. Our ‘family’ is living on $3.77 a day for food. That means we have a little more than a dollar per meal total, so let’s go find out what kind of dinner we can get for the four of us for about a buck and a half.”

We had to angle our shoulders as we shuffled through the pinched-in aisles of the neighborhood grocery store, trying not to knock things off the sloping shelves onto the cracked, broken linoleum underfoot. We dodged around splayed-out arrays bulging with oversized bags of chips and boxes of sugary junk food—Lay’s Potato Chips, Fritos, Ring-a-dings, Whoopie Pies. We ducked under hanging housewares dangled from the ceiling on baling wires, here a flimsy foldable wheeled shopping cart, there a clutch of feather dusters themselves dulled by years of dust accumulated while they awaited a buyer who would never arrive.

The meat counter was slightly disgusting, the browned edges of cheap cuts testifying to their extra aging, the darkened crust over the mound of hamburger contrasting painfully with the bright pink excavation where a recent portion had been scooped out. Only the frankfurters looked like something any of us had voluntarily eaten before but probably would have been slick to the touch.

But we couldn’t even afford frankfurters, as it turned out. The guys were competent mathematicians, and they quickly calculated that we were in the wrong department entirely. The migrated to the shelves of pasta and settled on a pound of spaghetti as something both familiar and affordable. The price of the pasta didn’t leave enough for a jar of real pasta sauce, but they did find an inexpensive can of tomato paste that could be diluted a little and smeared around to add at least some reminder of what pasta should taste like.

Dinner passed unremarkably, and with little else to entertain us, we retired early. The scritch-scratch of little rodent feet scurrying about in the walls did not keep anyone awake overly long.

We awoke to our first full day on welfare. Two went out to purchase food for breakfast. The team had decided that we could afford pancakes, and we ate them muddied by cheapo phony “maple” syrup. Afterward, we toured the neighborhood on foot for a couple of hours, finding nothing of interest but much to revile. Rancid garbage spilling out of battered cans whose silver galvanization was peeling off the corrugations that had been battered and cracked once too often. A used condom at the mouth of an alley. Shop windows so opaque with years of filmy dirt and condensation that the nature of the goods on display behind them was not self-evident. Skeletal hulks of cars, abandoned one day and stripped clean that same night by urban piranhas. Hunched passers-by intent on avoiding eye contact. Splattered vomit, still moist on the sidewalk just outside a dingy bar. The three well-dressed, proper young Princeton gentlemen shuddered “Yuk!” plenty often, but never sighed “Ooooh!”

Lunch. Time for lunch. So what shall we have for lunch. We can spend about a buck and a quarter, for four of us. How about using the rest of the pancake mix, and then buying a hot dog apiece to cook. Okay. That was lunch.

The afternoon dragged along its dreary way, a bit more walking, some sitting around the apartment. A little target practice snapping rubber bands at the cockroaches that were bold enough to make a daylight run along the baseboard. And some languid conversation about dinner. What to buy, what we could afford. Some gallows humor about what would be on the table at home in Princeton that night.

Dinner was two boxes of Kraft Dinner—macaroni and cheese. It tasted all the better for being a bit familiar. And then to bed early again. No reason to stay awake and experience any more than necessary of this increasingly depressing place.

By the next morning, there were hints of emerging mutiny. Boredom had been novel for a while, but now it was getting to them. After a breakfast of bread with margarine and jelly, a little grumbling leaked out. How many days did we agree to stay? What was the point of this again? Are you sure you did the calculations right, on how much we have to spend? I could tell they were beginning to longingly compare this with what they’d be doing—and eating—if they were back home today.

But some dawning awareness was also seeping out. Questions about people on welfare. How does somebody wind up on welfare? Why don’t they just get a good job so they can have enough money to live right? Are they stupid? Lazy? Retarded? Hmmm. I wonder what the schools are like around here, anyhow. Could you get a good enough education here to get a good job? They chewed on that for a while.

We walked the streets a bit more that afternoon, just looking around, then sat on a low window sill of a shop near the corner for a minute until the shopkeeper chased us away. The other places where someone who was tired might sit had been booby-trapped to make sitting painful—sharp shards of glass embedded like stalagmites in the mortar of the sill, cast iron spikes jutting up to impale a buttock, steeply angled sheet metal to frustrate the resting of weight. We finally found a tiny park, but both benches were filled with young mothers whose kids tumbled and frolicked around their feet.

We saw little clusters of local guys on the corners, smoking and shuffling and mumbling little nonsense stuff back and forth. The kinds of people we’ve always seen on corners in the middle of the day and wondered what they were doing there, instead of out working, doing something useful.

Seeing the locals lounging aimlessly reawakened the talk this morning about what kind of schools the neighborhood kids go to, about whether the teachers they have and the things they learn are enough to get them into college—or, at least, to get them a good-paying job. Do they have the smarts? Did they get the learning? Can they pass muster in the competition for work? Would employers want to hire the kinds of people we’re seeing around us?

Would my dad hire anybody from here?

We dined that night on a box of doughnuts and two bananas, shared.

Dawn came on our fourth day in town. Not sunrise. The dawning. After another breakfast of starch, the guys didn’t feel like going out on the street. They didn’t feel like doing anything. They felt run down. Somebody remarked on how pooped he felt, despite the fact that he hadn’t done a damned thing to make him tired.

“Maybe it’s all this crap we’ve been eating,” another ventured. “Shit, we haven’t had a square meal in three days. Pancakes, pasta, bread. Where’s the meat? Where’s the fruit? Where’s the salad? No damned wonder we’re wiped.”

“Maybe—hmmm, I don’t know—but maybe that’s got something to do with what’s wrong with people on welfare,” mused one. “You suppose they feel this wiped out all the time?”

The tempo picked up.

“Be hard to get excited about charging all over town looking for work if you felt like this.”

“Or what about going to school, even?”

“Could make you pretty lazy. Wait, I don’t mean ‘lazy’. I mean, you know, acting lazy.”

“I don’t think everybody would just roll over and take it, though. Lots of them would find work somehow.”

“Right. But what if nobody hires you. Not a lot of jobs I can see. You know what kind of work you’d do around here? Sell dope. That’s what. Hell, it’s what you could do, if you really wanted money in this neighborhood.”

“I’d never thought of that before. Dope pushers as entrepreneurs. But I guess they are. People in Princeton sell cashmere sweaters. People here sell grass and stuff.”

“Funny. We make a big deal of ‘teen enterprise’ where we live. You get awards for going out and finding a way to earn money by yourself. Here you get your first trip to jail.”

That afternoon we stood next to a car that was parked on the street not far from our grungy apartment. Someone noticed that the keys were in the ignition. We were so bored—and I include myself in the ‘we’—that we actually had a conversation about how easy, how appealing, it would be to, you know, just borrow the car for a few minutes. Not steal it, exactly. Just, like, spin around town for a little while, get out of this dingy neighborhood, see the sights.

We didn’t take it that day. A week later, we might have.

That night our experiment crashed. I broke first. I just honest to God couldn’t face another meal of starch, and so I took the guys to a nice Jewish deli where we each got a plate of serious food. I can remember to this day, almost forty years later, what I had and—cross my heart—my cheeks have just begun salivating as I am writing this, right this instant, remembering how fantastic that food looked, tasted, felt. I had a huge scoop of chopped chicken liver, sliced red onion, a bagel, and a cup of coffee with real cream. I can see it now. I don’t know or and didn’t care what any of the others had. I was all I cared about at that moment.

The next day we returned home to our beloved Princeton. The town was just as we had left it, but we were not.

Killing Me Softly With His Kindness

I had done him a simple favor, and he was thanking me. His thanks were ruining my life.

Joe was the CEO of a company that ran the concessions at numerous ballparks, stadiums, and racetracks including many of the most renowned sporting venues in the world—Madison Square Garden, Louisville Downs, Shea Stadium, Giants Stadium. His firm had a private box at each venue, and as our friendship ripened he had made them available to me for the asking. Most times, I came to realize, they otherwise went unused. So I would routinely put in a call to his secretary and secure tickets for whatever event caught our fancy—a World Series game, Pele’s last match, Westminster Kennel Club, the National Horse Show, Masters Cup Tennis Championships. With a wife and daughters who loved dogs and horses and a son who loved anything done with a ball, we were in hog heaven.

He even found a way to help me get front-row mezzanine season tickets to the New York Giants football games, during the shuffle of seats when the team relocated from New York City to the Meadowlands.

Then one snowy winter day we sat over lunch in a little café in Princeton, and I could see he was troubled. I probed, and he began to express his consternation about the difficulty his company was anticipating from some kind of proposed legislation in Washington, D.C. They had never encountered this sort of challenge before, and he was perplexed about how to get handles on it.

At the time, I was spending a lot of time in D.C. and had relationships with a few well-placed people who might be able to offer some perspective, so I offered to make a call or two to see what I could learn.

I did, and what I learned was that this apparent threat had little substance or momentum. It was just one more grandstanding feint by a legislator looking for a little attention. “It’s a non-starter,” one of my friends assured me. “This’ll blow away like a fart in a windstorm.”

When others confirmed this earthy assessment, I reported back to Joe and promised to monitor the situation until it was certifiably dead and gone. That was the end of it.

Or so I thought.

In early March, the postman brought a compact package about the size of a deck of cards. When I unwrapped the brown paper outer-wrapper, there was a small card and two slim boxes that lay before me, like flat jewel-boxes. The card just said, “Thank you. Joe.”

I opened the first box and lifted out a small, thin black wallet—the kind that some people use to hold their business cards. I flipped it open and beheld within a beautiful, multi-colored calligraphy like a miniature diploma. Across the top in ornate lettering it said “The National League”. Below that, also in elegant calligraphy, it said: “Admit Eliot Daley and Guest” and the current year. That was it. But what was it?

I opened the second box and extracted a duplicate case, but in red leather. Inside, comparably decorative calligraphy headlined “The American League” and carried the legend about admitting me and a guest that season. The mystery deepened. Admit us when and where? How often? Under what circumstances? It all seemed pretty open-ended.

Turns out, that’s because it was open-ended. Completely. These passes would enable me to walk into any major league ballpark at any time for any game anywhere that season. With a guest. And sit down in some of the best seats in the house. Free, of course. Any game. Anywhere. As often as we felt like it. As it turns out, each stadium reserves a number of “house seats”, usually situated just behind home plate, to accommodate the small number of holders of these very special passes.

My ten year old son Jad went simply berserk. He was a flat-out sports nut and was consumed with fascination about every aspect of every kind of game. He monitored the rosters and vicissitudes and performances of sports teams with the same intensity day-traders apply to their high-risk, boom-or-bust investments. As his encyclopedic knowledge of sports facts and trivia had become known to his older sisters’ friends, their friends would call this young twerp at all hours of the day and night to glean the trustworthy facts that would settle a sport argument or to seek his opinion about the likely outcome of a game coming up that weekend.

And now, through some miraculous, incredible, mind-boggling stroke of heaven-sent blessing that would forever make Santa Claus seem a piker, he could go to any major league baseball game anywhere any time? Are you kidding me? Un-be-lieve-able!

There was never any question in Jad’s mind, of course, about who “Guest” meant.

Nor was there ever any question about how many games we would go to. The major league baseball season is 162 games long. Half are played at home, and half are played away. That meant he had a lock on seeing eighty-one games, right? Wrong. One hundred sixty-two.

Our home in Princeton, New Jersey, was situated at the epicenter of three—count ‘em, three—baseball stadia. The Yankees were 61 miles to the north, and the Mets’ Shea Stadium just a tad farther east, 63 miles door-to-door. A mere 47 miles to the south, the Phillies played their baseball. That meant that every single day of the baseball season, all 162 dates, somebody was playing but a mere hour away. So we’re going every night, right, Dad? Right? Huh, Dad? We’re going every night! Right?

Oh, God, what have I gotten into here, anyhow. Why did I ever let him see these passes? Why, oh, why didn’t I just fling them into the fireplace when I had a chance?

I don’t mind baseball really. I have been to a few games in my life, and it’s not a bad way to while away an afternoon if you have nothing better to do and have brought along good company. The good company is essential, of course, because nothing much ever happens down on the field. A tall man repeatedly throws a ball to a guy who squats. Another fellow with a stick stands close to the squatting guy and occasionally swings as the ball approaches. He rarely actually connects with the ball, but sometimes he does. It makes a sound, so you can look up from whatever you were reading or look away from your conversational partner to determine whether the flight of the ball is meaningful. Usually it curls sideways up into the air and lands among the nearby seats. When sent onto the field of play, the ball is normally caught in the air or snatched up and flung to a person standing at the first base, whereupon the man who had the stick goes over to sit down in a low-slung, dank shed with his friends to await another chance to swing, an hour or so later.

Jad and I went to quite a few games that season. Actually, a lot of games. Well, let’s face it—a hell of a lot of games. Each was interminable, made tolerable only by the delirious delight of my son. Anything that could bring him that much sheer joy seemed worthwhile, even if precluding my spending that particular balmy summer evening engaged in adult conversation over a glass of wine with friends on the broad porch of our house.

But to a sports-mad ten year old, the glass seemed always half empty. How could this troglodyte father of his literally sit on these passes in his back pocket and spend the night at home when there’s a game going on just an hour away? Come on, Dad! What’s the matter with you?

To Jad, I was a walking demurrer machine. For every time I said “Okay”, I said “Not tonight” or “Not today” five or ten times. How could he ever understand that I had other things to do—other things I had to do, and other things I actually preferred to do—rather than take in yet one more baseball game. No matter how much I loved him and loved to please him.

“But, Daa-aa-aa-d…” He could stretch “Dad” into about four singsong syllables, like pulling a strand of bubble gum from his mouth, as though I might be dragged into a “Yes” if he just kept the sound going long enough. He was impervious to the ground rules I had eventually established about school nights and homework and the like. Jad could always satisfy the requirements or, alternatively, come up with some reason why they were moot on that particular day.

I got respite from this daily entreaty only when a massive rainstorm would blessedly blanket the entire mid-Atlantic region, canceling action in all the ballparks within reach. Oh, how I came to love the word “rainout”. It relieved me of having to splash one more unwelcome “Not today” down onto his hopefully upturned face. Ultimate relief finally arrived as the end of the wearying season crept glacially into view and then ground to a halt. I was able to do at last what I should have done at first—dump the little ducats into the trash can. Thank God they’re gone. Now I can resume a normal life.

Or so I thought.

The next spring, the passes popped up again like cheerful little crocuses. And worst luck, Jad found them in the mail that afternoon, before I got home from work. I was floored. Joe’s thank-you gift had been extravagant to start with, way out of proportion to the modest favor I had done him. But to renew them for a second year was over the top as a gesture of gratitude, and certainly way more than I was prepared to cope with all over again, as a bone of contention between my now-eleven year old son Jad and me.

When I recovered my equilibrium, I sat Jad down for a heart-to-heart. Look, son, there really are a lot of things in my life that need tending on a day to day basis, irrespective of the fact that some young athletes may be cavorting on the fields of play in these stadia ringing our town. We need to set a maximum number of games that we’ll be seeing together this year with our pass, and that will be it. So you go over the teams’ schedules and see which games you think will be the most important to you, and we’ll do those games, and no more. That’s it.

Eleven is mighty young to lose respect for your father. I remember reading Freud’s account of an incident at a comparable age. He and his father were out strolling when some local anti-Semites accosted his father and knocked his hat off into the gutter. Young Sigmund fairly quivered in eager anticipation of the furious rebuke his father was sure to administer these ruffians. Instead, his father meekly stepped aside until they had passed, then retrieved his ruined hat from the gutter, replaced it on his head, and resumed the stroll. Freud was devastated. I actually believe this incident accounts for much of Freud’s later hostility to the notion of a God.

But never mind about Sigmund. It was the dimming of admiration in Jad’s eyes that I was concerned about. I saw it. I felt it. He knew I just wasn’t the man he thought I was. Or wanted me to be.

How could this be? What is happening here anyway? How could something so theoretically wonderful as The Pass turn us into adversaries? How could it sour the most precious relationship possible? This is crazy! Suddenly I understood the plight of King Midas. I was cursed with a touch that, in bringing apparent riches, was rapidly robbing me of my child.

I called Joe and thanked him again for his thank-you gift, and I asked him earnestly not to renew it for a third year if that had been his intention. (It had been. He had envisioned this as a perpetual gift.) I did not burden him with the real reason why. It was sufficient to declare that his gratitude was more-than-enough already.

Then I set about making the best of the next baseball season. We went to more games than I wanted to, and fewer than Jad wanted to. The ground rules and quota helped some, but never enough. The very existence of The Pass was a toxic ingredient in our environment, and it took an agonizingly long time to eventually flush the residue from our systems after the season was over. Disillusionment is inevitable, of course, and almost anything can trigger it for a child. I just wish it hadn’t been something supposedly joyful.

When I was young and ambitious, striving for success and yearning for financial security, I worked at one point with a much older person who had massive amounts of money—hundreds of millions of dollars. She was adamant about not leaving her fortune to her nephews, who were her only heirs. I knew her nephews and knew they were of modest means, men whose lives would transformed in glorious ways if she would but bestow on them some substantial share of her enormous wealth. I thought she was cruel not to bequeath it to them and relieve them of their struggles to make ends meet like everyone else.

Now I understand.

The world of business is anything but rational.

Thinking Out-of-the-box Ain’t All That Easy

Our brains are programmed to trap us. It’s just that simple. Once they get a notion, they’d much rather repeat it than go to the trouble of getting a new notion.

Now, in lots of situations, that’s fine. I like it that my brain keeps reinforcing my love of Patti and the kids and grandkids and my other friends. And that it keeps prompting me to stop at red lights, scratch what itches, chew before I swallow, keep my wrist firm on a volley, avoid gybing in high winds, and stuff like that.

But it can really mess you up in other situations. It cost Johnson & Johnson a couple of hundred million dollars at one point.

J&J had decided to go up against a formidable rival, Procter & Gamble, in the disposable diaper business. P&G’s Pampers had a dominant share of the market, but J&J was confident that it could offer a superior product and set out to make one.

What I have always loved about J&J is their absolute dedication to offering new products only if they are demonstrably superior to every other competitive product in the market. That requirement was one of the three litmus tests—beyond probable profitability—a prospective new product had to pass before senior management would approve its launch. (The other two: show how it leverages the strength of the J&J brand-name, and show how it replenishes that fund of brand-name goodwill for J&J.)

And in developing their new disposable diaper, that dedication to superiority was in full force. A top-level R&D team was assembled with a goal of producing a fabric that possessed unprecedented levels of “wicking” power—the ability to swiftly draw urine and fecal moisture away from the baby’s skin into outer levels of the fabric, to reduce irritation and possible infection. Because J&J has a century of experience and expertise in creating sterile fabrics for its bandages, they had a running headstart on achieving this goal, and they reached the mark pretty readily.

Okay, the first litmus test was passed with flying colors, and it didn’t take much to satisfy senior management on the other two, either. Certainly parents’ historic devotion to other J&J baby products would tilt them toward at least trying out J&J-brand disposable diapers, and their ensuing satisfaction with the superior wicking would replenish their gratitude toward the corporation. Everything was in place.

Except leaky bowel movements.

They moved right on out of the J&J diaper. It turns out the design of the J&J diaper left some gaps around the baby’s legs where runny feces could trickle down onto…well, onto the lap of mommy or daddy or granny or whoever else was dandling the little tyke at the moment. This would seem to be a rather formidable problem.

It was made more formidable as a competitive liability because P&G’s Pampers had introduced a diaper with snug-fitting, elastic-banded legs that trapped leaky feces before they could escape. Clearly, this seemed like a good idea.

Except to some J&J true-believers who insisted that the superior wicking was much more important. I even heard one, in a moment I’m sure he’d regret if he ever recalled it, muse that if the point of wicking was to lure the feces away from the baby’s bottom, then having it leak away from there through a gap in the diaper might actually… No, no, I can’t even bring myself to finish his ludicrous defense of his diaper’s inferiority.

They asked us to help them deal with the disastrous competitive performance of this inferior product. Oh, I’m sorry. Inferior product may have sounded a bit harsh. What I meant to say was ‘the challenge presented by the fact that their superior wicking technology’—that’s better—‘just happened to get fashioned into a product that has some, you know, sort of, ummm, downsides.’

Well, we did our best. It became clear that the diaper-product management team was totally committed to the idea that superior wicking would somehow, some way, someday overcome the little disadvantage created by feces leaking into people’s laps. Having just invested in a brand new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility at great expense, they were ill-disposed to radically overhaul it in order to mimic Pampers’ elastic-banded, tight-fitting legs. Couldn’t we find some inexpensive quick-fix that would enable them to halt the boomerang effect of people who swung over from Pampers to try their product, because J&J’s name was on it, but quickly abandoned it in favor of going right back to Pampers?

We had some ideas, but our client didn’t like them. We said, okay, if you really refuse to re-tool for elastic-banded legs (our most earnest recommendation), then how about appealing to parents’ sense of style? At the time, every diaper in America was white. Plain white. Parents bought pretty little diaper covers and over-britches that were patterned, but a billion diapers a year came out of the box snow white.

So, we said, how about going to Levi Strauss and Laura Ashley to license some of their patterns that you could inexpensively print right on the outside layer of the diaper. They’d be adorable, and you might at least hold onto some business on the basis of cuteness while you re-think, we earnestly hope, your recalcitrance about dealing with the leaky-leg problem.

No, they said. That would be undignified. Healthcare companies cannot be seen trivializing their products in such a manner. And it could even serve to distract from our main marketing positioning and message: superior wicking!

Two years later J&J abandoned the disposable diaper business, shutting down their zillion-dollar, high-tech, superior-wicking production facility and taking a massive write-off for the loss.

How does this happen? These were all very, very smart people who had been very, very successful at running the company. What was going on here, anyhow? How do people get trapped into such tunnel-vision, into such self-defeating over-commitment to the status quo?

One factor is the set of blinders that knowledge creates. Once we know something, that knowledge can cast a shadow over other, disconfirming knowledge that might be even more valuable.

There is wonderful experiment that illustrates this phenomenon at work. Say two dozen subjects are recruited for this experiment. A dozen of them are asked to sit in a waiting room where they are free to chat among themselves, read magazines, talk on cell phone, or whatever until it’s their turn to do the experiment.

The other dozen are taken into a different waiting room where there are few distractions—no magazines, and cell phones are not allowed. The lights are off, but there’s plenty of natural light coming through the windows. As they sit there waiting and wondering about what may transpire in this experiment they have agreed to participate in, an electrician enters the room. He’s a garrulous kind of guy, greeting everybody in a very friendly way. He then turns to the light switch next to the door, pulls out a screwdriver, and starts to removes it.

Looking back over his shoulder, he engages the group, as though it would have been rude not to explain to them what he’s up to. “We’re replacing all these older toggle switches in the whole building with new variable-intensity switches,” he explains.

“Did you ever see one of these things up close?” he asks the group as he turns toward them. He holds the old toggle switch out and shows it around. “Here’s how they work. See these terminal posts up here? That’s where you hook the wires with the juice—the electricity—that’s coming in. Now take a look at these other terminals on the bottom here. That’s where you hook up the wires in the wall that go to that light fixture up there on the ceiling”

He makes sure everyone gets a nice close look at the toggle switch.

“But here’s what makes it a switch,” he says as he turns it around to show the back. “See, on the back side of that lever you flick with your finger are these contact points. When the lever gets flicked this way,”—he demonstrates—“it closes the gap between those little points right there so the electricity can flow from the upper terminals to bring the juice across the toggle into the lower terminals where it can be fed to that light fixture there on the ceiling.”

He demonstrates again, then continues. “But if I flick it this way, it breaks that connection, keeps the juice from getting from one terminal to the other one, and bingo, no light! So the most important thing about a toggle switch is…”

By now everyone has heard more than they ever wanted to know about toggle switches and begins wishing that they could have brought their iPod or a good book into the room. But no matter. Moments later, the first of them is called to go to a different room to begin the experiment. The electrician finishes up his work and leaves, too.

Now here’s the experiment they are there to do. Each subject—both the ones from the waiting room where they could do whatever they wanted, and the ones who got the lecture and demonstration about toggle switches—is ushered by himself or herself into a bare room about twelve by twelve. The room is absolutely devoid of any furniture or decorations. Besides the bare floor, ceiling, and walls there are only three things to notice. There is piece of string hanging down from the ceiling over to one side of the room. There is another piece of string hanging from the ceiling on the other side of the room. And over by the door, a toggle switch is lying on the floor, next to the baseboard, right below the now-empty electric junction box where the light switch belongs. It has apparently been left there by the electrician who may have been interrupted half-way through replacing the old one, or who may have left to go get the new one, or whatever.

Each subject is given the same simple assignment: “You see those two pieces of string. I would like you to tie them together.”

Well, how hard could that be. So the subject walks over to one of them, takes it in hand, and then walks over toward the second one. But before the second one comes into reach, the hand, and then the arm holding the first string becomes gradually stretched out as the subject maintains a grasp on it and finally, the limit is reached. The subject cannot get to the second string without letting go of the first one.

Okay, so that doesn’t work. But maybe I just grabbed the wrong one first. So they drop the original string, and go over to grab the other. With it firmly pinched between the fingers, they head over for the original string. But just before getting there, they run out of stretch again. Can’t reach that one without dropping the other one.

Hmmm. Not done yet. Some subjects will stand directly between the two and reach both directions, stretching as far as they possibly can, even leaping up as though that would somehow increase their wingspan, in what proves to be a futile effort to grasp both strings simultaneously.

At that point, the subjects all invariably scratch their heads—funny how universal that is, as a sign of perplexity—and look around. All they see are the two strings, and, oh, yes, that toggle switch lying next to the baseboard over there by the door.

A bit more head-scratching, and then the people who got the lecture about the toggle switch give up. They are stymied. They declare to the researcher who ushered them into the room that this stupid trick can’t be done. Can’t the researcher see that? There is no way to tie these two strings together, because they’re too damned short to reach with both hands! Having set the researcher straight on this, they go away defeated.

Most of the people from the other group, whose heads are not full of knowledge about toggle switches, look down at the switch by the door, and get an inspiration. They pick the toggle up, tie it to the end of one of the strings, and then swing that string like the pendulum on a clock. They stroll over to the other string, pull it toward the swinging one, and when the toggle-pendulum comes near they grasp it. They tie the two strings together and declare victory.

For them, a toggle could be anything—a pendulum weight, or a door stop, or a hopscotch toss, or a beer-bottle opener, and even possibly a manager of electric current.

The others knew too much about toggle switches. They were fixated on its “true” purpose, and they had so absolutized that purpose that they were precluded from seeing any alternative uses for it.

So one problem is the fixation on what you already know. It creates blinders that obscure alternatives. But that’s only half of it. The other problem is that we overvalue what’s in our grasp. Our wishful thinking impels us to think that what we already have will save the day.

Another experiment illustrates this warped thinking perfectly. The researcher is stationed near the check-out counter at a convenience store that sells lottery tickets. When a customer buys a $1 ticket, the researcher intercepts the customer before they can scratch it or whatever else they do to reveal its value to them.

“Hey,” says the researcher. “I see you have a one dollar ticket there. What do you say I give you two dollars for it.”

The ticket-holder glances down at his or her ticket, pulls it a hair closer to their body, looks back at the researcher and says, “No way.”

The ticket holder has no idea at this moment, of course, whether the ticket they are clutching to their body is worth nothing at all, or a couple of million dollars. But they have already invested it with enough wishful thinking, enough hope, to refuse an offer that would double their investment—and permit them to turn right back to the counter and buy two $1 tickets, thereby doubling the odds of a payoff.

“Okay,” says the researcher, “how about three dollars? I’ll give you three dollars for it.”

“Uh-uh, nope. I’m keeping it,” comes the reply.

“Four dollars?”

“Nope.”

“Five dollars?”

“Nope.”

“Six?”

“Nope.”

And so it goes. And goes. And goes.

“Fourteen dollars?”

“Nope.”

In a lottery game that is utterly dependent on “the odds”, the subject just passed up a chance to improve their odds by 1,400%

For no reason whatsoever, the subject believes this $1 ticket has some value greater than what they paid for it and greater than what is being offered for it. Pure, unadulterated, wishful thinking.

“Nineteen dollars?”

“Nope.”

It keeps going. All the way up to the average breaking point of—are you ready for this?—twenty-three dollars to get the person to part with a $1 ticket that is in all likelihood totally worthless.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with imputing irrational value to something that is dear to you. That’s what The Velveteen Rabbit is all about. No, it’s not inherently wrong, but it is very often situationally disastrous. The trick is to know when the circumstances call for hard-nosed rationality rather than warm-hearted commitment or dogged loyalty.

Getting that trick right could have saved J&J a bundle.

Billion-dollar Denial

Denial comes in all sizes, but not often in billion-dollar doses. But in this case, that was the size of the bait.

Pharmaceutical companies win with “blockbuster” products—the billion-dollar drugs that get a jump on the competition, become the favorite of the prescribing physicians, make huge profits—and pay for the dozens of other drugs the company paid millions to research and develop and test that proved not to be efficacious or, if efficacious, not competitively superior to the alternatives. Every new product in the research and development pipeline carries with it the hopes of the company that this will be the one, the big one, the blockbuster—the cash cow that for the 17-year lifetime of its patent protection will make the company prosper and will cover its losses on its losers.

It was a simple and consistently profitable business so long as the products they sold were in prescription-drug form. Develop the drug. Do the research. Convince the FDA that it was efficacious. Promote it to the doctors. See the prescriptions land on the pharmacy counter. Smile at the routine re-filling of the prescriptions when they run out. Listen to the cash register ring. And ring some more.

Then along came a hybrid category to muddy the waters. They are known in the trade as “nutriceuticals”—products that are in the form of a food or nutritional supplement that also produce efficacious “medical” results. The first wave of nutriceuticals came in the form of foods like margarine that put substances into the body that could lower blood cholesterol. A number of companies set out to capture this market, including my client—a massive multi-national corporation. If you could create billion-dollar drugs, why you could certainly create billion-dollar nutriceuticals, couldn’t you?

After a year of development and testing, they were convinced that they had proved the efficacy. And their projections of the size of the market and demand made it clear—no, really inevitable—that this one could be the billion-dollar winner. Now they just needed to confront the implications of entering into a different kind of marketplace than their usual drugs went into. No longer issuing yet another prescription item that could be promoted to a few hundred thousand prescribing physicians, they had to appeal directly to tens of millions of consumers. No longer channeling it through pharmacies, they had to negotiate for hotly contested shelf space in supermarkets. No longer relying on patients to faithfully re-fill their doctor-ordered prescriptions when they ran out of pills, they had to create re-purchase loyalty in the face of aggressive competitors seeking to divert the customer to their own brands. Oh, and the cost. Their nutriceutical margarine would cost more that twice as much as regular margarine. And three times more than the bargain brands.

Clearly, they had some serious issues to deal with.

So they hired us to help them think through these challenges, and we began as usual by conducting one-on-one interviews with the two dozen or so people who were leading the effort—from the researchers to the marketers to the strategists to the CEO of the division that was developing it.

Well, as it happened, the two days on which we conducted our interviews were the final two days of a wonderfully well organized internal experiment. To generate confidence and commitment among their team, they had all agreed to consume this nutriceutical margarine as recommended on the package—three times a day—for two weeks. To assess the benefits, the members of the team would have their cholesterol measured daily.

The organization of the experiment was truly impressive. Each member of the team was given a code name to protect their privacy, because the daily results were posted on video monitors placed at multiple locations throughout the team’s office. So everywhere you looked, you could see the results: each individual’s code name, their starting level of cholesterol, and a day-by-day charting of their changing cholesterol levels. The display showed every individual’s results, as well as the team’s aggregate results.

Well, did this stuff ever work! And fast. Every single member of the team showed truly significant decreases in their cholesterol levels. And not puny gains, either. In less than two weeks, most were down by ten percent or so, and some much more than that. No wonder they thought this had to be the billion-dollar deal!

But people are funny about drugs and other medicines that are supposed to be helping them. If the doctors says to take this stuff every day or you’ll die, well, you probably take it and keep on taking it. You may not know what it’s doing inside your body, but what the heck, better be safe than sorry.

On the other hand, if you have a rash and the doctor gives you some ointment to use for thirty days, you’ll use it until you see for yourself that the rash has gone away. If that’s in a week, well, the rest of the ointment is ignored. The tube sits on a shelf in your medicine chest and gets pushed around from time to time until some day a few years hence when you notice it with distaste and think to throw it away.

My one-on-one interviews with the members of team went as usual. Lots of fact-finding about what and why and when and where and how, trying to gather multiple perceptions and perspectives about what they had and what they faced so we could define the threats and opportunities and help them come up with a winning strategy to cope with the challenges.

But some perverse instinct prompted me to throw in an off-the-wall final question as I was closing my first interview. I mentioned that everyone—presumably including my interviewee—had done amazingly well at lowering their cholesterol during the two week regimen of eating their product three times a day. “So,” I asked, “are you going to keep up the regimen after the experiment is over tomorrow? Will you keep eating this stuff?”

“Uh, oh, I hadn’t really thought about it. Hmm. No, probably not.”

I didn’t pursue the issue with him, asking why. But I decided to ask the question to each of the other thirteen people I’d be interviewing that day and the next. And I did. So did my partner, when I told her what I had heard. We asked them all.

One of them said she’d keep eating her company’s amazing cholesterol-lowering margarine. One of them. That’s all. Twenty-two of the twenty-three allowed as how they’d probably not. Along the line, we started asking why and got a range of answers. “Doesn’t taste that hot.” “My family prefers butter.” “I would, but I don’t always eat where it’s available and don’t want to carry my own supply with me.” “You know, there’s a lot of trans-fat in the product; it may lower my cholesterol, but I don’t think that much trans-fat is good for people.”

Several days later, I led a day-long workshop with the whole team in which we reviewed the formidable array of barriers to success—securing a distribution channel through local “food brokers” who control what products reach the supermarkets, competing for refrigerated shelf space with established food producers, price resistance, competition, lack of enthusiasm for the taste, and finally the difficulty consumers would have in perceiving any direct benefit. Unless and until consumers went back to their doctor and had blood tests to confirm that it was “working”, they wouldn’t know—and even if their cholesterol turned out to be lower, that may have been attributable to other factors. All in all, the litany of obstacles was pretty grim.

Then I revealed the results of my little survey. I said to the assembled team, “You all ate this product for two weeks. The conditions could not have been more ideal. You got the product for free, despite that fact that it’s very expensive relative to the alternatives. You got direct daily feedback that confirmed that it was in fact improving your own personal health in very dramatic fashion. You had the support and camaraderie and team commitment that sustained your compliance with the regimen.

“And yet, when we asked how many of you were going to keep on eating this product when the experiment was over, only one of you—one person—said they’d keep on eating it.”

The wave of terror that washed across the faces of the team prompted me to hastily assure them, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to name the one who said they’d continue, so you are all free to pretend that you are that one. But let’s consider the implications of this. If you, with all the advantages the normal consumer will never have, don’t want to keep it up, what in the world makes you think they will?”

Shortly thereafter, I sent my written report to the team leader, cataloging the withering array of daunting weaknesses in the initiative. But the report never saw the light of day, of course. Too much had already been invested—too much money, too much hope, too much expectation…all in a company where the culture frowned on doubters or nay-sayers. They plowed ahead with the product launch.

It flopped, of course.

But no matter. By the time the failure was evident, the CEO of the division had been promoted to far greater responsibilities in the corporation, largely on the basis of his skillfully managed and highly promising diversification into nutriceuticals.

Blowing It

The first time I played tennis in an inflatable building, I was slightly nervous about what would happen if the fabric roof were to rupture and come down on us. Would we have time to flee for safety, or die an ignominious death smothered by vinyl? As it turns out, it’d take a long, long time to settle to earth, and so the thought no longer occurs to me in such buildings.

But it does occur to me that the leakage of momentum from a business is somewhat like that—the air goes out more slowly than one would think, and it takes a while for the once-high roof to come to the ground—but once it begins, the descent is not likely to stop. That’s why the vast majority of the companies that comprised the Fortune 500 early in the 20th century simply no longer exist or got swallowed up by others in their deflated condition.

I had a chance to watch one such deflation at relatively close range. Sears, once owner of what was literally the highest roof in the world, on the Sears Tower, and owner of the highest position in American retailing, was the major underwriter of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in 1970 when I became president of Small World Enterprises, the company Fred Rogers founded to be the owner/producer of the program. And so I got to know the senior executives of Sears in the course of our partnership to bring “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to American homes. At the time, Sears utterly dominated retailing in the United States, with 87% of U.S. households doing business with Sears every year. (As their CEO told me sardonically, “If you throw in the people who steal from us, I think we’ve got 100%.”) Their competitive superiority, their share of market, their franchise with American consumers was unparalleled. Montgomery Ward and J. C. Penney, once formidable competitors, were reduced to minor annoyances.

Over lunch one day in the executive dining room high atop the Sears Tower in Chicago, I asked the head of marketing for Sears what accounted for their incredible success. His answer was straightforward.

“We never mistake ourselves for our customers. We executives who sit in these suites are not typical Sears customers, and we never forget that. We make too much money. We have developed too-refined tastes. We are out of touch. And so the folks a dozen floors below us—our market research department—are entirely responsible for our success.

“Whatever they tell us, we believe it, and we do it. If they say that people want green left-handed widgets, we go find the best manufacturer of green left-handed widgets we can find, order a bunch of them, and put them on the shelves. And, by God, they fly right off the shelves into our customers’ shopping baskets.”

Fast-forward ten years. I am now a consultant developing strategies for clients in the world of healthcare—principally Johnson & Johnson. We are approached by a senior executive at Sears, which by now has acquired some new divisions. Sears, the master retailer, now also consists of Allstate Insurance, Dean Witter, and Coldwell-Banker.

“We’re thinking about diversifying into healthcare,” he says. “We’d like you to develop a diversification strategy that will make us a five billion dollar player in healthcare within three years.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “why the number five billion?”

He had a simple answer. “Because at that size it’ll still be only about ten percent of our total sales. Anything less than that, and we’d not take it seriously enough.”

Fair enough. So we set about our task.

Job one, in my book, is to understand the genetic code of an organization. If you want to diversify or to acquire or to initiate any other dramatic kind of growth, you just have to know where you’re starting from. What really makes them tick, down deep? Who do they think they are? What gets them going in the morning? What vision of success are they pursuing? What hard assets have they amassed? But even more importantly, what kinds of people have been drawn to their work? What is the elasticity of their mindsets and capabilities? What are they good at? What else might they be good for?

We interviewed top executives and middle managers throughout the Sears organization and made good headway on all these questions, but we had one question that could only be answered by the very highest officers, the Chairman and the President. So we asked them, “What did you have in mind when you acquired all these other companies that are now the major divisions of Sears?”

The answer came clear and strong. “We came to the realization that the vast majority of the wealth of Americans is represented by the equity they have in their homes. So rather than settle for selling them a lot of stuff—we already do that—we’re going right after the whole thing.”

“The whole thing?” I puzzled.

“Sure. The equity. We want to get our hands on all that equity, one way or another. That’s why we bought Dean Witter. Heck, we don’t want to be in the stocks and bonds business. We want to develop it into America’s primary mortgage banker. So, we’ll have the whole deal, see? Think about it. We help them buy or sell their house through Coldwell Banker and get those commissions. We carry the mortgage through Dean Witter and get all that interest. We insure it through Allstate and get the premiums. And of course we furnish it with our Sears retail business and get the profits from that. And the clothing that’s in their closets—that’s from Sears, too, and carries great mark-ups for us. We’re going to get it all!”

I found it a little hard to imagine that the folks a few floors down had come up with market-research findings that showed American homeowners just salivating at the prospect of being so abjectly dependent upon an octopus-like Sears siphoning money out of every crevice in their homes. But, who knows? Maybe they did.

Well, don’t count on it. When we submitted our healthcare-diversification plan to Sears’ management many months later, we showed them how it would in fact achieve the financial goals they had challenged us to meet—sales, profits, return on investment. But we also submitted a cautionary advisory to them: “We think you would be unwise to pursue this diversification. In our observations of Sears’ operations and divisions during the course of this engagement, we note that the intended synergies among the newly acquired divisions of Sears remains largely unrealized and are probably unrealizable. More important, we detect considerable weakness in your core retailing business, and if that begins to deflate you may find it difficult if not impossible to recover momentum. There are others waiting in the wings ready to displace you if you falter there.”

To their credit, they took our advice and shelved the diversification plan.

Alas, they were too late to stem the impending slide into eventual irrelevance. They had taken their eye off the ball. They had come to disdain their own retailing legacy relative to a sexier, more intellectually appealing mega-strategy. And as senior management lost its commitment to, and focus on, what their customers really wanted, Sears stores lost appeal. Their seduction by this dream of dominance proved all but fatal. Wal-Mart and others stormed right past, shoving them into an also-ran position.

Their eventual floundering to recover relevance prompted many bad decisions, but none worse than one that virtually renounced their genetic code—and at the worst possible moment, too. In the most ironic, self-inflicted, unkind cut of all, Sears—the company that for over a century had established catalog shopping as a staple of American merchandising—eliminated their own catalog operations at the very inflection point in retailing history when remote shopping through catalogs, Home Shopping Network, and the internet was taking off like a rocket ship. Billions of transactions are now conducted through the very channels that Sears almost certainly would have pioneered and dominated if they had continued to exploit their own genetic endowment instead of seeking to exploit their customers’ wealth.

On March 22, 2005, the name “Sears” was removed from the New York Stock exchange, as the tired carcass of the company fell under the ownership of K-Mart. The once most-dominant retail corporation in U.S. history was officially extinct.

Am I Not Wonderful?

It does take a certain degree of self-confidence to lead. To found a new business. To become CEO of a corporation. To break new ground with innovative products or services. To put investors’ money at risk. To hold the livelihood of employees in your hand. Yes, self-confidence is probably an essential quality for success in many pursuits.

But beyond that essential self-confidence, there is what we can just call ego. Sheer, unbridled ego. Some business leaders are so addicted to their love of self that they can’t resist plastering their names all over the place. Think Donald Trump. Some, like Trump, run businesses that enable them to plaster their names on massive buildings, so that the public confronts the self-beloved name at every turn.

But they are only the most conspicuous of these needy folks. Ego springs forth in a million private ways throughout the world of commerce.

A former partner of mine was at one time the right-hand man to Norton Simon, an industrialist who created a massive conglomerate in the ‘60s and ‘70s. My partner had been organizing a hotel conference room in which they would shortly stage a high-level meeting between the top executives of Norton Simon, Inc., and a company they were considering acquiring. He asked Simon about his preferences for the seating arrangements, and got this reply:

“It doesn’t matter. Wherever I sit will be the head of the table.”

Okay.

I uncovered another exercise in blatant egotism when reading a strategy document outlining Coca-Cola’s plan for success. They had calculated that human beings require 64 ounces of fluid daily to survive, and their modest goal was to supply half of that liquid to every person on the planet—all six billion or so. Well, that’s alright—I admire big (even grandiose) ambitions as much as the next guy. But they went on to calculate how much more that would be than is currently sold by Coca-Cola and their “competitor” (at Coca-Cola, they never, ever deign to speak the name of Pepsi). They determined exactly how much bigger the market would become. Of the increase in the size of the market and their aspirations for Coke’s share of that market, they concluded that they wanted it all. However much the global market expanded in the years ahead beyond its size today, Coca-Cola would seize every ounce of the new growth. Why? As they actually put it in writing in their strategic plan, “Our competitor does not deserve any share of the increase.”

Deserve? Did they say “does not deserve”? Arrogating to onesself the right to make that kind of judgment requires an ego the size of the universe.

Another great industrialist in recent decades was Armand Hammer (remember that name). Hammer led a very successful company called Occidental Petroleum. He was one of the most enlightened business leaders of his generation, virtually alone in his willingness to pursue the then-feared-and-hated Soviet Union as a place to do business. He had immense confidence in the power of capitalism and mutually advantageous contractual arrangements to override the political paranoia and paralysis that impeded US/Soviet relations. He prospered as a result.

One day the phone rang on the desk of a friend of mine who was the CEO of a small company in New Jersey named Church and Dwight. Most likely you’ve never heard of Church and Dwight. But Armand Hammer apparently had, because the call was from an investment banker Hammer had commissioned to approach Church and Dwight. With the exquisite diplomacy requisite in such a call, and without initially revealing the identity of his client, the banker probed to discern whether there was any possibility that Church and Dwight would entertain a friendly overture to be acquired by a much larger company. The overture was politely declined, in favor of remaining independent. At the time, the company was just beginning to take off, through a brilliant program of diversifying beyond its longtime staple product to build multiple consumer products that employed its core ingredient, leveraging the widespread “brand name recognition” of its staple product.

So the petroleum industrialist Armand Hammer never did get to own Church and Dwight—and along with it the brand name of that staple product.

Which was and is: Arm & Hammer.

Hitting Below the Belt

“And so we never want to have anything to do with you again. Please leave now.”

With those words, my partner and I were dismissed from the CEO’s conference room. Game over.

Game over, but the lesson was just beginning—my first serious lesson in business ethics.

Three months before, our small consulting firm had been invited by the CEO to compete for a contract to create a strategic masterplan for the chain of seventeen hospitals he ran. The first phase was to develop an overall plan for the chain, and then move on to create individual plans for each of the individual hospitals. A couple of years’ work and millions of dollars would flow to us before it concluded.

We were delighted but not surprised to be asked to compete, even though most of the other competitors dwarfed our boutique-sized firm. We had developed a solid national reputation through our work with blue-chip hospitals and medical centers, and we had yet to lose a contest to any of the major competitors.

We didn’t lose this one either. The large chain of hospitals was one of many owned and operated by Roman Catholic congregations of nuns. We had been through an arduous screening process of writing and presenting proposals, capped by a meeting with the Mother Superior of the congregation and the executives who managed their seventeen hospitals. The day after our final meeting, the call came from the Ed, Executive Vice-President of the chain who had managed the competition: Congratulations. The contract is yours. We’ll be touch shortly to set up a kickoff meeting.

High fives all around our office. Jubilation. Celebratory lunch at a fine restaurant nearby, and listen everybody, take the rest of the afternoon off.

Flowing below the jubilation was a massive flood of relief for Mitch and me. We had quietly bet the farm on winning this contract. Once the competition began, we went all-out to learn their needs, interviewing multiple executives throughout the chain. We lavished extra time on a superior proposal that represented, in effect, a substantial “free sample” of our strategic thinking on their behalf. And during the process, we established the all-important relationship of trust between us and the prospective client on which every consulting contract ultimately rises or fails.

But all those things are just normal pursuit of business, not “betting the farm”. Our bet-the-farm move was to deliberately let our pipeline of other new business prospects dry up. We knew that if we won this big one, it would immediately consume the entire capacity of our small firm. We also knew that if we did devote our entire firm to it for a couple of years, it would raise us to a whole new level of capability, prominence, and future growth. Because we were used to winning against “the big guys”, we felt this was a reasonable risk to take—even though it would put us in a deep hole if we lost.

But we didn’t lose, and so we waited for Ed’s call to schedule the kickoff meeting. And we waited some more. And we kept on waiting. After two weeks, I called Ed’s office to get the ball rolling. He’s busy just now, I was told. I waited for the “He’ll get back to you” but didn’t hear it. I asked when we might speak together, and she wasn’t sure. I said I’d call back later and she supposed that would okay.

Hmmmm.

Four or five more calls were equally unproductive. Hmmmmm.

Then, finally, it came: Ed would like you to come for a meeting with him and the CEO on September 11 at 10:00AM.

No problem. We’ll be there.

Mitch was not available so Rick, a senior partner, joined me for the flight out to their offices. We were ushered into a conference room where the CEO, Ed, and their General Counsel awaited us on the far side of the table. Their greetings were muted and the handshakes across the table perfunctory, a duty seemingly dispatched with minimum grace. Eye contact was fleeting and guarded.

We sat.

The CEO opened a folder and extracted several pages of blue stationery, a personal, handwritten letter. “We received this letter three days after we awarded the contract to you.” That is all he said, and then he proceeded to read it. This letter went like this:

March 22, 1988
Dear Mother Superior,

I hope this is the right way to address you. I don’t know if it should be mother or sister. I am not a member of your faith, and so I apologize if this is incorrect. A friend who is a Catholic said this would be okay. I am sorry and please forgive me if I made a mistake. I meant no offense.

I just had to write to you. Something is happening that is really wrong and I have to tell you about it. It could hurt you and the other sisters and a lot of people.

Last Wednesday I was flying from Chicago to Newark. There were two men in the seats just in front of me. I do not eavesdrop on people. Please do not think that I am snoopy, but they were so loud that I could not help hearing what they were saying. I think they had been drinking a lot and sometimes that makes people louder. They kept asking the stewardess to bring them more drinks. They were very bossy to her.

But they made me so angry! They were laughing about having fooled you in some meeting they just had with you so you gave them a contract for a lot of money. It was something about making up strategies for hospitals your religion runs. Money, money, money was all they could talk about. How much money they were going to get from you.

Hospitals are so important. But these men said they could not do all the work you wanted them to do. It must have been a very big contract. Because they kept laughing about how you could have given so much money to their little company. They said they did not have nearly enough people to do the work. But they weren’t worried at all. They said they would just have to “dazzle them with footwork”. Just like they had done with other people they worked for. Dazzle them with footwork was their very words. I could never forget them. And they said they’d never get caught. Laughing about fooling religious sisters. Saying how stupid you were. It seemed so mean. And what about those hospitals. If they don’t know how to do the work, does that mean that patients and doctors would be in trouble. I don’t know because they didn’t give details.

It was just that they made me so sick at heart, to think that people like that would try to put one over on people who have given their lives to God.

I hope you don’t think I am a bad person for listening to these men and taking notes on what they said. I am really not like that, but they were so loud and so mean I just had to listen and to write this letter to you. I hope it was not a wrong thing to do but my conscience would not let me keep quiet.

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

Melvin Stein

The CEO looked up from the letter, stony faced. With intense contempt he stated, “And so we want to have nothing further to do with you. Ever. Please leave now.”

I glanced quickly at Ed and the General Counsel. No eye contact. Impassive.

I looked back at the CEO and fixed my eyes on his. “When I was in the fourth grade,” I said steadily, “someone scrawled the word ‘fuck’ in bold letters on the cover of my geography book while I was outside at recess. Before I returned to class, my teacher saw it and assumed I had written it. I was subsequently hauled before the class, publicly humiliated, sent to the principal’s office, and suspended from school.”

I continued, “I was no more guilty of writing ‘fuck’ on the cover of that book than I am of the behavior described in that letter. Just for starters, I do not even drink alcoholic beverages, let alone practice or condone the duplicity the writer describes. But it is clear that you have decided unquestioningly to accept the letter as truth, and so we will indeed leave now.”

The door leading outside to the parking lot had barely closed behind us when Rick exploded.

“Jesus Christ, Eliot! What the hell’s the matter with you! Don’t you and Mitch know enough to keep your mouths shut in public places? You’re the guy who’s always preaching to us: ‘protect client confidentiality!’ He said it like a slap. “How many times have I heard the sermon: ‘Never use client names in public places.’” Slap. “’Avoid conflicts of interest at all costs.’” Slap. “’Do whatever it takes to give the client what they need, whether we lose money on it or not!’” He pushed his red-hot face toward mine. “Don’t you ever listen to yourself?” He spun away, almost bellowing now. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it!”

Arms flailing, he whirled into a couple of 360-degree spins as though trying to helicopter himself into the air and disappear, to fly off somewhere, anywhere. When he finished the flailing, his body slumped and his head hung down. Anger spent, he muttered bitterly, “You’ve screwed us all. We’re ruined.”

My God, I wondered, did I have that conversation with Mitch? Obviously Rick believes it. These guys here believe it. Whoever wrote that letter believes it. Am I losing my mind?

I struggled to remember exactly what the letter had said. Mitch and I do talk about how we will staff big projects, and sometimes we really are stretched thin. We do rely on creativity of thought, not just analytical methods, to come up with innovative strategies for our clients. And—wow! Oh, shit!—we do joke around a lot with each other, forever making outrageous, facetious statements in our playful but deliberate campaign to constantly stretch our minds and break out into new ideas. Do you suppose we did say something like that stuff, and this guy just got it all wrong…….?

We climbed into the car, and Rick’s disgust settled over me like a stench. The trip home was rotten.

Back at the office, we labored to reconstruct the event for the rest of the firm. Rick was still sunk in misery, quite sure that I had betrayed him, the firm, the client, and the principles for which I ostensibly stood. I was groping in confusion, pretty sure by now that Mitch and I had indeed had been overheard on the plane but that the letter writer had just misinterpreted the whole thing about our methods and staffing. What I couldn’t understand, though, was why he had embellished his story by reporting other comments I knew we were simply incapable of thinking or uttering even in our most playful moments.

“Look,” Mitch said finally, “you guys are both still in shock, and I can’t figure out what that letter said or didn’t say. I hear what you’re telling me, but we’ve got to get our hands on a copy of the letter. That’s the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this thing.”

“What’s the use?” Rick asked bitterly. “What’s done’s done. Let’s just get on with it. We’ve got to bust our butts to rebuild this firm or we’re all going to be out on the street. Dwelling on that letter’s not going to do us any good at all. We’re screwed, and that’s that. Let’s get on with it.”

And so we did. Despite the fact that the CEO regularly trafficked with many of our past and prospective clients, we chose to override our fear that he might be out there poisoning the marketplace for us by spreading word of the letter. It was all-hands-on-deck, putting new leads in the pipeline, closing new contracts, launching new projects. In time, we got rolling again.

But the recovery all took place in a cesspool. The firm stank with self-doubt and paranoia. Were Mitch and Eliot really as despicable as the letter writer portrayed? The question hung like dense, sulphurous smog over the firm, befouling every breath, clouding every glance, choking every conversation, obscuring every view of the future.

Mitch and I found ourselves fully participating in the doubting of ourselves. The question shadowed me everywhere, taunting me to let go of my denial and admit that my dark side really was in control. The cumulative sins of my life assembled themselves into a vivid little universe just there, at the edge of my consciousness, with a magnetic pull that silently drew me to it. Come on, Eliot, just glide on over here and bring that latest little act of infamy with you. Settle down here amidst all the worst that you’ve done. This is your real home. This is the real you. C’mon over.

Meanwhile, Mitch still wanted to see the actual letter, and after much badgering and eventually a threat by our lawyer, Ed sent us a photocopy.

Months had passed, but the letter stunned us all over again. As we read it aloud, people around the conference table couldn’t breathe right, like the oxygen was being sucked from the room, and their eyes lost focus. Then we spread the pages on table and huddled over them like some primitive tribe working over a pile of bones or sheep guts in fearful hope that the gods had a message in there which would put more distance between life and death for us. We read and reread passages to each other, laying the terrible question before us again—did Mitch and Eliot really say those things?—and searching for any clue that would release us all from the dismal fate that awaited if the answer was “yes”.

Our office manager Linda drifted out of the room at one point and returned with her calendar. She flipped through the pages, studied several, and then quietly announced, “The writer says this happened on the Wednesday before March 22nd. You weren’t on a plane that day, or anything close to it. You were both working in New Orleans that whole week.”

The table fell silent. Nobody said anything for several minutes, each spinning some private story to explain what this meant. Is this a puzzle? Is there a code? How can this be? I had long since explained to myself what Mitch and I probably said—our normal facetious banter—and how it was misinterpreted. So I immediately concluded that Linda was wrong and the writer right, such is the power of self doubt and rationalization. Only when she reminded me exactly what we had been doing in New Orleans did I realize how fully entrapped I had been by my dark side—and somebody else’s, as well.

Rick got his friend Lew, a top corporate lawyer and litigator, to drop by that afternoon. Lew settled himself at the conference table, withdrew his half-glasses from behind the silk handkerchief in the breast pocket of his well-tailored suit coat, placed them halfway down his nose and began to read the letter. We studied him intently as he read and detected absolutely nothing. Do not play poker with Lew.

He looked up, removed his glasses, folded them, slid them back into his breast pocket, and pronounced matter-of-factly, “Commercial sabotage.”

Huh?

I had never heard the phrase before and did not know what it meant.

“Somebody wrote this letter to kill you guys. Made up the whole thing. Fabulous job. Really brilliantly well done. Probably one of your competitors, like the runner-up. Do you know who they hired after they threw you out?”

“Come on, Lew,” I protested, “people don’t go around doing that, making up stuff like that just to get a piece of business. That’s ridiculous.”

I was fifty-one years old when I made that statement. Still, Lew managed not be condescending when he begged to differ with me. “Uh, Eliot, people do lots of things to get a piece of business, most of it way worse that that letter. You’d be surprised. We see it every day. Hey, it’s a serious part of our law practice.”

I wasn’t convinced, although Mitch and Rick and others in the firm were inclined to agree with his judgment: we had been assassinated by a poison-pen letter from a competitor. No harm in considering the possibility. But what to do about it? What course of action could we possibly pursue to set things right and see justice served?

Well, for starters, our colleagues in the firm could begin to repair their frayed confidence in the integrity of Mitch and Eliot. If the letter was indeed a complete fabrication, the toxic doubt could dissipate and our firm could recreate what had been an extraordinarily close and trusting family feeling among us. That could happen, and it almost did.

But, curiously, no serious effort to seek justice materialized. Lew was pessimistic about ever discovering and proving authorship. And nobody had any stomach for it anyhow. It was as though the restoration of our trusting community, coupled with the recovery of our business momentum, was enough. Let’s not squander our precious energy on trying to undo what was done. Let’s move on.

And there it rested uneasily until we hired Betsy.

As business picked up, we started growing again and needed to bring in another senior partner. We had crossed paths with Betsy repeatedly at industry conferences where we all making speeches and leading workshops. We were impressed with her, and our conversations grew friendlier over the years. Then one day the timing was right. We were ready to hire, she was ready to move, and she joined our firm.

To give Betsy a running headstart, we sat down to review our business history with her. Describing the downturn and rebound of the previous year, we told the story of The Letter, and out of curiosity she asked to see it. Mitch had a copy of it in a nearby file and produced it for her.

The letter was barely in her hand when she gasped, “Oh, my God.” Betsy looked up at us with a swirl of emotions rippling across her face. “Wait just a minute.” She laid the letter on the table, pushed back out of her chair, and hurried from the room.

She returned carrying a handwritten memorandum on the letterhead of her former firm. She placed the memo on the table right next to the letter.

The handwriting was identical. Distinctive, and absolutely identical.

“Hank wrote this letter,” she declared, referring to her former employer—the founder of a prominent and well-respected consulting firm that was a competitor to our own.

Both documents were unquestionably written by a single person. Anyone could see that in an instant. But seconds later we were digging deeper, to reconfirm the already-foregone conclusion. Like eager schoolchildren playing a game, we raced to find the next match-up of individual letters and whole words. Look here! See how when he writes “the” he curls continuously back from the end of the “e” around to cross the “t” with the same line? No, wait, see this? The way he always starts a capital letter with an upstroke from the bottom of the initial letter? Yes, but look over here. He uses one kind of “s” when it starts a word but a different kind when it’s in the middle or end of the word. A dozen or more unique and unmistakable similarities leapt off the pages.

The game went on for a while, and then we backed away from the table almost in unison, settling ourselves into the stunning, ugly reality. From micro gesture to macro scrawl, these pages were all written by the same hand. The hand of a really brilliant, really nasty man.

Now we knew who had blown our contract out of the water. Now we knew who had destroyed our relationship and reputation with the chain of hospitals. Now we knew who had savagely damaged our business.

And now we knew who had poisoned the trust, polluted the atmosphere, and toxified the relationships among a group of friends who had once created a truly exquisite working community together.

I wanted to kill the son-of-a-bitch.

We retained the services of the recently retired head of the FBI handwriting analysis laboratories, and he swiftly confirmed our conclusions. He was prepared to testify and demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt what we all knew was true.

Then we retained a law firm that specializes in investigatory work, and they turned our perpetrator’s life inside out. By the time they finished, we knew everything that was knowable about him and his circumstances, his finances, his work and leisure and relationships, and—chillingly, the discovery of other incidents where he had used the same tactics, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

We even discovered that he had done it before to us. A large contract we commenced a couple of years before had been shut down almost immediately after the award, on plausible-sounding grounds of changed priorities. But the client proved hard to keep in contact with, offering no eagerness to maintain what had seemed a genuinely warm relationship. We were plenty busy with other clients, so we scarcely took notice later on when they revived the project—and the writer of the letter got the job. Not hard to figure that one out in retrospect.

And we already knew who had wound up getting the work from which we had been so unceremoniously dismissed on account of The Letter. Him.

There it was. We had this guy dead to rights. We conferred among ourselves about how to move in for the kill.

And that’s where the really serious trouble began.

Imagine that. After surviving an unscrupulous assassination of character, after surviving a multi-million dollar loss of business, after surviving the metastasis of self doubt and mutual doubt, suddenly we found ourselves in massive conflict over how to bring this jerk to justice.

I wanted to shut him down. Period. I felt he had no right to continue in the profession, and that clients and competitors had the right to be safe from his predatory practices. I was prepared to make him front-page news in an industry where he was widely known and highly regarded.

Others felt differently. Settle it quietly. Confront him with the evidence. Present him with a bill to reimburse us for the costs of getting the goods on him. Forbid him to compete for any piece of business in the future that we are competing for. That’s enough.

Wait a minute, I’d say. Something’s missing. What about his compensating us for the loss of income from the contracts he destroyed, for the damage to our business momentum? Well, would come the response, the investigation revealed that he has far less money than his prominence in the industry might suggest. Can’t get blood from a turnip. And what if he turns even nastier, retaliating in some ways we can’t even imagine?

The tug-of-war became a real war. I wanted blood, his blood. I didn’t care about the money. I wanted him OUT, and I felt it was our moral duty to drive him out. Others felt equally strongly the other way, and eventually our debates became so volatile they threatened to re-toxify the atmosphere only so recently cleansed of doubt and mistrust.

My pursuit of victory—a pursuit of vengeance, really—became a passion, gripping me and battering others. We were headed for a disaster. It became clear to me that, even if my increasingly agitated insistence on the take-him-out solution were to prevail, the victory would be Pyrrhic. So I relinquished my position, and the matter was quickly settled.

The assassin and his lawyer were summoned to the offices of our lawyers. No pleasantries were exchanged, and no handshakes were extended. We gathered in a panelled conference room and settled into leather chairs around the gleaming table. Our lawyer stated what we knew and presented our demands. The writer agreed to our terms, largely through a series of head nods and whispered asides to his counsel who spoke for him. I cannot remember whether he ever actually said any words out loud during the meeting or not. I do know that he never explicitly admitted his guilt.

It was the single most unsatisfying meeting I have ever participated in. Ever. We got what we asked for, but I hated it.

I know for certain that the CEO of the hospital chain who had thrown us out of his office eventually learned of what had truly happened—but he never had the decency to accept a call or make contact with us afterward. Humiliated by his mishandling of an anonymous letter, no doubt. One more victim.

The whole episode took a sad toll. A year later, I withdrew from the firm, ten years after co-founding it with Mitch. I didn’t withdraw just because of The Letter; it was time for me to move on into the next chapter of my life anyhow. But the episode both accelerated my departure and made it vastly more painful. Nine years of extraordinary harmony, deep friendship, and impressive creativity lay obscured behind one last, vivid year that began in corrosive suspicion and ended in conflicted resolution. Without that, we all would have celebrated my transition from the firm into the next chapter of my life; instead, my leaving devolved into an excruciating rending of flesh and psyche, leaving raw nerves that still sent flashes of pain a decade later. It took Mitch and me nearly fifteen years to completely recover our exquisite friendship.

I guess people who commit crimes like The Letter never think about that.

A few years ago, I would have said that last line indignantly, in anger. Now I say it sadly, in pity. What must it be like for him, I wonder, to be so out of touch with the human community that he either couldn’t imagine, or didn’t care about, the damage he caused. And I wonder what it must be like for him to explain to himself why it was okay to do what he did. Woeful.

We’ve both had a lot of years since then. My life has gotten much better. I hope his has, too.

Scumbags

Every endeavour has its share of scumbags. We’ve seen them misusing their power and defaulting their integrity in all kinds of arenas—politics, the church, sports, academe, and of course business. The massive scandals of the early 21st century, with multi-billion-dollar frauds at places like Enron and WorldCom, were seemingly de rigueur. Obviously some people will do whatever they think they can get away with.

As for Enron and WorldCom and the like, I only know what I read in the papers. But closer at hand, I have encountered some petty and disgusting examples that lack only scale to put them in the big leagues.

We can begin this tour of my personal Hall of Shame with a visit to the Executive Vice-President of one of America’s largest insurance companies. When I offered a couple of suggestions for how they could make the filing of claims more user-friendly, he looked at me like I was simpler than Forrest Gump. “Are you out of your mind?” he actually said. “The whole profit structure of this industry is predicated on unfiled claims. I can tell you right now practically to the penny how many unfiled claims are sitting in the desk drawers of our policyholders, and if they ever dragged them out and filed them, we’d be sunk! I know for sure, it’s more than the profit margin of this company is. And don’t look at me like that. It’s the same for all of us.”

Okay.

At another point in my career, I was president of a company which had developed an astonishingly effective computer program that helped people deal with intractable issues in their lives—daily stress, alcohol addiction, chronic dissatisfactions, and so on. At one point, I was entering into negotiations with what was then the largest commercially operated chain of alcohol treatment centers. It had begun some years before as an entrepreneurial venture backed by a U.S. government “Small Business Administration” loan of some $650,000 and subsequently proceeded to grow at a rapid pace, fuelled in those days by both generous insurance reimbursement for 28-day inpatient treatment for alcoholism and recurring infusions of new capital.

Of course, I wanted to understand this company before entering into a business partnership with them. I had long since concluded that life was too short to mess around working with people I didn’t like or respect, so I looked into their doings. In remarkably short order, I found everything I needed to know about them—hiding in plain sight in a microscopic-font footnote on the balance-sheet page of their annual report:

“Corporate counsel has concluded that the statute of limitations requiring repayment of the Company’s Small Business Administration loan has expired. This liability of $650,000 is therefore eliminated.”

Relying on the ineptitude of a federal bureaucracy that was tardy in chasing down its debtors, this set of upstanding citizens decided to welsh on the obligation.

I didn’t do business with them.

Nor did I do business with a major tobacco company upon whose CEO I had called at the behest of a business partner who sat on the company’s Board of Directors. At the time, I was running a consulting group that provided strategic advice to large companies regarding the effective use of their corporate contributions money. We looked for ways to forge synergistic relationships between these companies and the not-for-profit world to optimize the use of the dollars and the long-term effectiveness of the recipient organizations.

We were ushered into a classic board room—panelled walls of exotic woods, massive rosewood table, leather chairs that tilt and swivel, the whole nine yards of theatrical cosseting some executives feel good about. The chairman and his top lieutenants surrounded the head end of the table and began to give us an overview of their current contributions program and philosophy. After running through the usual uninspired list of good works they support, the chairman got right down to what really mattered.

“Our biggest grant, of course, is to the National Fire Safety Council. It’s our biggest grant, and we’re their biggest donor. And you can bet they know which side their bread’s buttered on, by God. Do you know,” he went on with a gathering intensity that became almost venomous, “Do you know,” he jabbed his finger like a gun, “that in more than thirty years of putting out their fire-safety brochures and stuff they have never once suggested that smoking in bed might be a cause of fires. Not once!” he thundered.

He subsided into a satisfied sneer. “They know what’d happen if they ever did. We’d cut ‘em off just…like…that!”

Okay, let’s get out of there. Join me now for lunch at Lahiere’s restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey. Lahiere’s is the classic, old-line French restaurant in town—been there for generations. Quiet. Established. Refined. Serene. Fine food and wine. My lunch guest was the co-founder of a monumentally successful business built on direct door-to-door or friend-to-friend selling like Avon, Tupperware, and Amway. With his millions, he had diversified into some other businesses, including as it turned out the milling of flour which he sold wholesale to large commercial bakeries.

The salad dressing at Lahiere’s is divine. Occasionally I’m fortunate enough to have them put up a small bottle of it for me to take home. And, of course, the baguettes are the best this side of France itself. Terrific delicate crumbly crust, great moist interior. The perfect way to start a meal at Lahiere’s is to order their house salad with the out-of-this-world dressing and then crack open the baguette—holding it over the salad as you do, so the little shards of crust will fall into the salad like small flakes of crouton.

So I passed the bread to my guest, eager for him to enjoy what was to come. As I reached the basket toward him, he recoiled and grimaced as if I were holding out a turd. “I don’t eat that shit,” he offered, with an undertone of incredulity that anyone ever would eat it.

“Huh?”

“That’s bleached white flour in there. Can’t you tell? Don’t you know what we do to that stuff? Hell, we bleach it with strychnine and all kinds of bad crap. I’d never let anybody in my family eat that junk!”

Snookered at the Sistine

What could possibly ever top this, I wondered.

The scene: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Christmas time. Evening. The museum is closed to the public. In the large gallery where the Museum’s justly famous Christmas tree stands laden with intricate figurines, only the lights on the tree and candlelight hold back the quiet dark pressing in from the far reaches of the great hall. Candles on tall candelabra, candles on the dozen or so round tables, glinting off the glittering crystal and fine silver, gently illuminating the china and playing on the glorious floral arrangements.

Here we are. In our finery. Surrounded by sixty or seventy other formally attired friends of our hostess who is staging this elegant dinner to usher in the museum’s exhibition of The Treasures of King Tut’s Tomb. Our hostess is a benefactor of the museum and has underwritten this exhibition which, in retrospect, seems to have inaugurated the era of “blockbuster” attractions in U.S. museums. The exhibition opens to the public tomorrow; tonight, it is all ours.

We are all very happy to be there. The setting is magical. The company is superb. The food and wine nudge perfection. And the post-dinner entertainment is unparalleled: we have the entire exhibit of the treasures of King Tut’s tomb to ourselves. A few score of us, free to wander among the golden treasures at our leisure, lingering for as long as we wished.

There were no guards in evidence.

Driving back to Princeton later than night, I found myself returning to the question: What could possibly ever top this?

The question was one of curiosity, not competitive spirit. I was pushing my imagination. After all, the fabulous find in King Tut’s tomb had become for millions the quintessential fantasy—gold, purest gold, deep yellow gold, gold so fine it looked like you could mold it with your fingers like a cube of butter, all worked into bracelets and crowns and bowls and chains and settings for breathtaking jewels, hidden away and only dreamed of for centuries. When it was unearthed, no one was immune to the compelling discovery. And the near-frenzy to view the exhibit would later confirm the magnetic appeal of the young King and the treasures which were laid to rest along side him.

Could there possibly be, somewhere in the world, another cache of artifacts with that kind of power?

Somewhere along the New Jersey Turnpike about midnight, my mind landed on the Vatican. After two thousand years of ruling the Roman Catholic world, the powers-that-be in the Vatican must have accumulated some pretty interesting artifacts—artifacts that held some potentially compelling interest for millions of people. We all know about the more visible treasures, like Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—but what about other things? Do they have pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified? The chalice he used at The Last Supper? The platter on which the head of John the Baptist was presented? The earliest manuscripts of the New Testament? Anything known to have been touched by Jesus? Great jewels or works of art? What’s hidden away in the chambers of that place that might excite the imagination and passion of the faithful, even while appealing to the historical and cultural interests of non-believers?

By the time I got home, the whole plan had bloomed in my head and I sat down and wrote it up before dawn. The Treasures of the Vatican. I could see it all. We wouldn’t settle just for some items to put on display. No, I had a couple of other ideas as well. I wanted everyone to be able to experience the mystery and wonder of these treasures. So, we would time the official opening of the exhibit for Christmas and produce a TV special to air on opening day. The special would bring the treasures and the experience to millions who would never be able to make it to one of the dozen or so museums around the world where it would be on display.

And for those who could make it in person to the museum but not to the Vatican itself, I wanted them to experience the one thing which in public imagination truly symbolizes the Vatican—the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. How could this be possible?

Just about this time, Polaroid had announced the development of a mural-sized camera. This massive machine was capable of scrolling across a surface to capture a swath of picture some eight feed wide. My idea was extravagant but simple: make photo murals of the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling and mount them on the underside of a prefabricated barrel vault ceiling which could be assembled and suspended in the grand hall or an entry way of each participating museum. That way, visitors could crane their necks just like tourists in the Vatican, to be enveloped by a full-sized replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling on which Michelangelo’s masterpiece was captured with photographic fidelity.

I knew it would take a coalition of interests to make this happen. I needed a high-level introduction to the Vatican, of course. But even before that, I needed to have the other ducks in a row. Somebody to sponsor the exhibit. Somebody to be the lead museum to organize it. A television producer to handle the Christmas special.

A call to a friend got me an introduction to Joseph Cardinal Baum, then Archbishop of Washington D.C. Yes, he said, he’d be pleased to introduce me and the project to the proper authorities at the Vatican.

What about a lead museum, I wondered. The Metropolitan in New York was an obvious choice, and getting access there was no problem. But a bit of digging turned up a controlling factor: there is a covenant among nations that when the contents of a country’s national museum are to be exhibited abroad, only the corresponding national museum of the host country may be the lead organizer. Since the Vatican state is a sovereign nation, only the National Gallery of Art in Washington qualified as the organizer and host for this exhibit.

(It turns out there is an understandable corollary to this arrangement: insurance coverage for travelling masterpieces, which may be valued collectively in the billions, is simply unaffordable for individual museums. Therefore, the governments of the host countries guarantee the safekeeping of these treasures and stand good for payment of any claims for damage or loss.)

So I called the then-director of the National Gallery, J. Carter Brown, and explained my plan. He enthusiastically agreed to serve as the host organizer in the U.S.

Another couple of calls lined up a TV producer with outstanding credentials for this kind of program and—an unexpected bonus—his own independent connections to the Vatican, through a former European colleague now advising the Vatican on various public affairs.

All we lacked was a sponsor. I wanted someone who would sponsor not only the museum exhibit but also the Christmas TV special. This meant looking beyond philanthropists to major corporations. But who would dare associate themselves with something so blatantly religious?

I spoke with a friend who was CEO of a Fortune 25 company. The conversation put him in a quandary. He instantly recognized the potential impact of the event. But, he said, we’re really on thin ice here. A very, very high percentage of the senior executives of our company are Roman Catholic like me. It’s mostly a coincidence, but you couldn’t ever explain that to the satisfaction of a muckraker or a dissident shareholder if they decided to challenge our putting up millions to sponsor this deal. I’m afraid I’ve got to pass. Have you thought about talking with Charlie?

I hadn’t. For good reason. Charlie was at the moment presiding over AT&T—then still the monolith which was later to be chopped up into the Baby Bells. He had his hands full, because one Judge Harold Greene was in the process of deciding whether AT&T was a monopoly deserving of dismantling or a useful utility whose outstanding service was integrally tied to, and fully justified, its monopolistic position.

But I called him anyhow, and he was intrigued by the idea and suggested that I talk to his colleague Ed who handles AT&T’s advertising, public relations, and corporate contributions. I knew Ed from previous dealings and looked forward to his response to the idea.

It was even better than I might have imagined. The writing was on the wall, and one day their monopoly would be gone. So, Ed said, AT&T was quietly laying plans to move beyond U.S. borders and become an international competitor in communications services. Yet, as a U.S. born and bred company with no previous international experience, they had almost no working relationships with senior members of government or the business world in foreign nations. Ed instantly recognized that AT&T could use this exhibit to open doors for them in countries where they wanted to do business—especially countries with strong Roman Catholic majorities. Rather than simply make a frontal assault as a business looking for deals to do, AT&T would introduce themselves via the exhibit as people of refinement and vision. He envisioned gala private parties like the King Tut affair where AT&T executives could meet and entertain the elites from government and commerce. One thing would lead to another, and soon enough they would have the relationships and networks AT&T would need to get down to business and expand globally.

Are you concerned with how your customers in the U.S. will respond to an apparent tie between AT&T and the Vatican? Not at all. We think these things you’re going after are treasures of the human family, not just a denomination, and we trust that others will see it that way too. Besides, there’s no proselytising going on here. It’s just an exhibit and a TV special, not a worship service or an altar call.

We quickly established the framework for the project and settled on a budget. Days later, the AT&T board approved it, the requisite calls were made, and we hopped a plane for Rome.

I never met Willie Sutton. But I have seen pictures of him. Slim and trim, like a jockey. Natty. Oh, really natty. But not flashy. Subtle. He came across as remarkably refined considering his humble beginnings and his then-current profession as America’s best bank robber. Finely tailored double-breasted suits, shirts without a hint of wrinkle, silk cravat knotted just right, shoes of buttery-looking black leather. Elegance personified. The perfect costume to cloak a heart of guile.

I did meet Walter. Walter was the head of the Vatican museums and collections. Unlike most high-ranking officials at the Vatican, Walter was not a priest. If he had been, he would have been the best-dressed priest in Christendom, but he was spared that challenge.

Walter was our man to deal with. Everything we wanted fell under his jurisdiction. He had the keys and he had the authority. And he had our attention. After welcoming us ever so graciously, he led us on a private tour of the Vatican’s art galleries and museums, to take inventory and make selections for our exhibit. Everything was closed to the public that day, and so we could move at our own pace. The pace turned out to be glacial. Pointing out works of art which he particularly favored, Walter gave us a docent-like mini-lecture on both the intrinsic qualities of the piece and the historical context in which arrived at the Vatican. Generous to a fault with his time, we meandered through the galleries for hours.

I was bored stiff. To begin with, the Vatican’s collection of art is nothing anybody would go out of their way to see. There are a few nice pieces here and there, but for the most part it’s pretty forgettable stuff by pretty ordinary artists. On top of that, I didn’t envision The Treasures of the Vatican as an exhibit of their art. I wanted their artifacts. I wanted that stuff hidden away down in the basement, glowing in the dark—the stuff that could generate mystique and piety and wonder. The only art I wanted was in the next room, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Well, of course we’d have to have at least some art, and my producer and our art expert were carrying on a running dialogue with Walter about which pieces we might want. They all seemed to be getting on famously. By the end of the tour, they had agreed on everything that seemed to need agreeing on. And I was almost out of my mind with desire to get into the Chapel, to experience its enchantment and to see if my grand scheme could possibly work.

Finally, finally, finally we made our way through several back corridors, then into the Pope’s small private chapel just off the rear of the Sistine. With polite deliberation Walter opened the door from the Pope’s chapel and ushered us through into the main chamber.

I was confused by what I saw.

We had emerged into a tangle of scaffolding. All I could see was pipes and planks and blue tarpaulins hanging over us.

I do beg your pardon for the mess, Walter apologized in his precise, measured English. We have had the chapel closed for some time now while we are restoring the Michelangelo ceiling. Please be so good as to follow me through this contraption and we shall get into the open.

As we emerged from behind the industrial fretwork against the rear wall, the true Sistine Chapel opened gracefully before us. Candlelight muted the color tones but their flickering glow made the fabled ceiling come alive, God and the angelic host seeming to hover over us, to move down over us, to embrace us with majesty and tenderness. Gently rounded, perfectly scaled, softly colored, richly peopled, the ceiling was heaven, and it descended on us. It fulfilled the farthest reaches of my fantasies and my hopes for it.

Now I knew the grand scheme wasn’t impossible. I could see how the Polaroid scrolling could work up the walls, across the broad expanses of the ceiling, under the arches. The luminarios—small gable-like window openings—would be tricky, but we’d figure out something.

We were babbling excitedly among ourselves when Walter called us to attention. If you please, come with me. And so we did, following him to the front of the chapel where, pickup up on Walter’s unspoken cue, we turned to face the rear. The back wall of the chapel through which we had entered was clad entirely, from the ceiling to the floor, in scaffolding from which great large tarpaulins were hung, like the curtains across a vast theatre stage. They totally obscured the wall.

We looked without comprehension while Walter set the stage. Keeping his steady gaze on the back wall, he spoke earnestly. “This greatest of works by the greatest of artists has suffered terribly over the centuries”, he said. “As you can imagine, so many candles. So many years. So much smoke. So much smudge. No one noticed, it was so gradual. But over the years, the genius of Michelangelo became veiled, became dimmed.”

I looked up and all around at the soft colors, looking the only way I had ever imagined them to be. They seemed perfect. Granted, there was a certain sepia tone to it, almost as through it were being seen through a film of root beer. But that’s just how I had always seen it to be in pictures. Isn’t that how it is supposed to look? What was he talking about?

Walter continued. “His Holiness realized that this magnificent work must be cared for with utmost dedication, and so he commissioned a restoration of the painting to carefully remove the accumulated layers of discoloration. I hope you will be pleased with the result.”

Walter made a slight gesture with his right hand at his side, a small wave from the hip. With unseemly suddenness, the massive tarpaulin peeled away all across the top layer of the scaffolding, came tumbling down, yanking away the entire curtain as it crumpled and fell heavily to the floor. As it peeled away, glare from intense lights blazed from all over the scaffolding, stunning our eyes, constricting our vision.

When our eyes adjusted, we were shocked all over again. The parts of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling and wall that had been hidden now leaped out at us in a Caribbean cacophony of colors—turquoise, orange, purple, red, yellow. What was this, anyhow? What’s going on? What had they done? Who is responsible for this atrocity? These neon figures belonged on the Las Vegas strip, not in the Sistine Chapel.

Turns out Michelangelo was responsible for the atrocity, and it turned out that we loved it. Walter led us back to the rear of the chapel and invited us to scale the scaffold, all the way to the ceiling, to observe the painting and the restoration work up close. In disbelief, we climbed up and up until we emerged on the top level of the scaffold where we were greeted by the chief of restoration. Our disbelief melted almost immediately. We were eye to eye with the figures Michelangelo painted. We could gingerly touch them with our fingers. For the next few enchanted minutes, the chief of restoration showed us the minute details of how Michelangelo had designed and executed his masterpiece.

“See here,” he would say, “See where the arm used to be extended out this way, but he changed his mind and repositioned it lower. See the lines of the original, and then the revision? He had to create more room to let the figure in the background be more visible. And see how rich and vibrant the colors he used—look what happens here when we remove four hundred years of smoke smudge.”

We watched intently as he picked out a section of the mural and gently scrubbed away the soft veil of grime, letting the sharp, unsettling brilliance of Michelangelo’s palette emerge. My snap judgment about Las Vegas was long gone, and I marvelled at what we’ve been missing for the last few centuries. I was more excited than ever to bring this masterpiece to millions.

Back down on the floor of the chapel, I confirmed with my colleagues that they had completed the financial negotiations with Walter and that we had a good list of the art to be included in the exhibit. All that remained was to get into the basement vaults of the Vatican to find the objects of veneration which were sure to reside there, and, of course, to make arrangements to create the Polaroid mural of the Sistine ceiling. I walked over to Walter and asked how many more months it would be until the restoration was complete, so we could arrange time to get the Polaroid equipment in there to make the murals.

He gave me a look of slight befuddlement. “The ceiling? I do not understand,” he said apologetically.

The ceiling, yes, I said. You know, we want to create a replica of this ceiling to be part of the exhibit.

His slender face drew inward, achieving a slightly cowed look of great sorrow and ineffable pain. “Oh,” he said, “Oh my. I’m afraid… Oh my, oh there has been some kind of…”

His body bent and sagged just ever so slightly, bearing the invisible weight of the world’s teeming poor. As their burden settled on his slight shoulders, he rolled forward just a bit into a posture suggesting dignified supplication.

“Oh, I’m afraid there has been some misunderstanding. We have agreed on the works of art, and I believe you also wish to consider objects of veneration which may be in the possession of the Holy See. But the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s masterpiece…” His voice trailed off in contemplative silence. I waited.

“This is a separate matter entirely,” he resumed. “It cannot be included in the arrangement we have negotiated.”

I gave him a quizzical look, and he gave me an earnest sermon.

“You see,” he continued, “this masterpiece does not belong to the Holy See. This masterpiece is too great a treasure to be truly owned even by the church. This is not a painting. This is a miracle, and it belongs to all the people in the world, to the whole human community, to God’s creation. To be sure, it resides physically here at the Vatican, but we are only the stewards of this miracle.”

He checked for a reaction and then went on.

“The church,” he intoned, “bears a grave responsibility for the human community. There are so many who are in need—the poor, the homeless, the orphan. They put great strain on the resources of the church, and we are in constant pain at how little we are able to do in contrast with the magnitude of need. Maintaining the missions is so very, very costly.”

Okay. Now I understand. This is not a turn-down on the ceiling; it’s a negotiation. It’s not that I can’t have the ceiling. It’s just that it’s going to cost me—dearly.

Walter tented his fingers and continued. “You see, we would be irresponsible stewards of this miracle if we did not use it to lift the pain of the world’s poor. He dropped his head in penance, as if contemplating in shame the error of failing to wring some money out of the ceiling to feed the hungry.

When he looked up again, he fixed me with a quiet, steady look that said it all: I’ve got it. You want it. You have access to the bank account of the largest corporation in the world. Let’s make a deal.

I never saw Willie Sutton ask a bank teller for the money, but I’m guessing he could have learned something from Walter about being cool at the moment of truth.

On the plane back to the U.S., I mused about the stance that Walter and the other Vatican officials were able to adopt at every turn. The unspoken but unmistakable message was not obnoxious or arrogant, but just quietly self-assured: we’ve been around for a couple of thousand years now, and if you are unhappy with the terms we’re suggesting today, well, why don’t you drop back by in a couple of hundred years and we can discuss it again.

With the terms of the deal pretty well settled, we were prepared to get to work. But then some potholes appeared in the road back at home—potholes which were ultimately to swallow up the project completely.

As word of our deal spread throughout the arts community, some sharp rivalries reared up. The Metropolitan Museum in New York began to have some ideas of its own about the Vatican, and despite the international accord about national galleries only dealing with their counterparts, the Met moved with force to interpose itself into the situation. Within days, battle lines were drawn: on one side, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, graced by a board of notable worthies; on the other side, AT&T, graced by a board of equally potent heavyweights. The Met had one other important weapon. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York was recruited to intercede with the Vatican, and he did so with devastating effect. Since the archdiocese of New York is the single largest financial contributor to the coffers of the Vatican, its leader has a bit of clout. This had all the makings of an epic battle.

The battle never happened. Neither did our project. My clients at AT&T threw in the towel. We could win this fight if we fought it, they said. But even as we speak Judge Green is in his chambers deciding whether AT&T should be broken up or not. This would not be a good time, they went on, to be demonstrating to the world how big and tough we are.

We folded our tent, and the Met took over the project. Of course they did what an art museum would do, bringing over the best of an indifferent collection of art and completely missing the big idea. Without the power and mystery of the artifacts, there was no drama to the exhibit and no basis for a TV special. As for the ceiling, my guess is that it never occurred to them to bring it home alive. The exhibit they did put together toured to a couple of other U.S. museums and was then disbanded.

I never went to see it. I do still see my vision of how it might have been, though.

I am part of the problem.

MORAL PARALYSIS

In the early 1970’s, lots of us adults were trying to hard to reverse the effects of prejudices we had been marinating in since our childhood. I cringe now at the memory of the teenage Eliot blithely using the “N” word, telling racial jokes, ridiculing ethnic minorities, and accepting sex-role stereotypes without a second thought. All the more disturbing in retrospect, since my parents were the least prejudiced people I have known before or since, and my mother in particular achieved some considerable local renown as a civil libertarian. But wherever it came from—probably my wanting to blend in with my teenage buddies—the prejudice was effective, and later, as an adult, I found myself actively working to re-program my thinking to escape its lingering effects.

So I was particularly disturbed when a delayed eruption of my old stereotyping blindsided me. I was in the back seat of a taxi in New York City. We were on a cross-town street—somewhere in the 30’s, as I recall, between Lexington and Park—and were stopped at a red light. About four cars were ahead of us leading up to the light.

I laid my newspaper in my lap to enjoy a little people-watching. I was idly surveying the pedestrian traffic flowing past us on the sidewalk when I noticed a man—a black man—striding down the sidewalk in our direction. He had his right hand in the pocket of his trench coat, and the first thought that flew into my mind was, “He’s got a gun!”

Oh, Eliot! My newly enlightened mind snatched me back and upbraided me. What a disgusting thought! You are, sadly, a long, long way from escaping the miasma of the past prejudice you are justifiably ashamed of. How could you think such a thing, anyhow! Man, you have a lot more work to do on yourself than you imagined.

While undergoing the altogether proper harangue from my superego, I continued to observe the man in the trench coat. He turned left into a liquor store right opposite me. As the light turned green up ahead and the taxi started to inch forward, I saw the clerk in the store and several nearby customers raise their hands in the air.

As the cab picked up speed, I resumed reading the newspaper in my lap.

Several blocks later, an idle thought loped briefly across my mind—something to the effect that I might have had a responsibility to do more than ride away from the hold-up in bemusement.

But I had more important things to attend to, and that was the last of it.

THREE STRIKES

The pilot waggled his wings to acknowledge he saw us standing below, then made a couple of passes over the ranch, sizing up the situation. The two-lane road that stretched across the barren New Mexico landscape was narrow and battered—not an ideal runway for landing his small plane. Yet that was the deal. I needed to get out of there right now, and he was supposed to get me out.

Several more loops apparently convinced him the roadway was just wide enough to match the spread of his landing wheels, and he settled in to touch down. With a screech and a bounce he hit the roadway dead center, the wheels on his landing gear skittering along with no more than six inches of crumbling asphalt leeway on either side. The plane grabbed the rutted roadway as he braked and jounced to a stop a hundred yards from where we stood transfixed at the spectacle.

The audience for this trick landing: My pony-tailed wife in Levis and a denim shirt and cowboy boots, wearing traces of dirt and horsehair from the early morning ride. Our three young kids comparably attired and gritty. And our friends—two other young families grubby the way people get when vacationing together on a 100,000-acre ranch in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from a city. And me, standing out in my best suit, crisp white shirt and tie, citified shoes that had been shiny an hour ago but were now powdered with a patina of fine high-desert dust, ludicrously holding a spindly, six-foot-tall sculpture made of welded square nails purporting to depict an Indian legend of the life cycle.

After watching the torturous landing, Patti wondered out loud if this flight was really necessary. Could he take off safely again once I was aboard, negotiating that skinny, bumpy roadway? What if a wheel caught the edge, and we flipped? Couldn’t I just drive to Albuquerque and get a later plane? Did I really have to be back in New York tonight? Couldn’t it wait until tomorrow? But she knew what my answer would be even as she asked her anguished questions.

I was in a panic, and dying in a Beechcraft Bonanza flipped upside-down on a failed take-off from a rutted roadway in Abiquiu, New Mexico, seemed about an even trade with whatever my fate would be if I failed to avert the disaster that was looming in New York City. Or so it seemed to this overambitious thirty-something executive trying to rescue a business that had already suffered a nearly lethal body-blow.

As president of the “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” organization, I had ultimate responsibility for finding the money to produce the program. It came from several sources: corporate underwriting from Sears and Johnson & Johnson, fees paid by PBS stations, and income derived from the sale of Mister Rogers-related books and records. The profit from record sales had become a “cash cow” for us, money we really counted on. Records cost only pennies to produce and, in 1974, sold for around $5 in record stores and record departments in places like Sears. In fact, Sears alone accounted for more than 80% of our sales, being at that time by far the dominant family-oriented retailer in the U.S.

Only months before, life had seemed so simple, so secure. I had persuaded Johnson & Johnson to join Sears as a multi-million dollar underwriter of the program. We renegotiated a long-term contract with PBS. And CBS, then king of the record business, was distributing Mister Rogers records to stores all across the country. While the mass commercialization of Sesame Street was claiming the lion’s share of dollars to be spent on such wares, our goals and needs were relatively modest. The record income was providing the precious “last dollars” that put enough in the till to keep producing our low-budget “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” programs for as long as our inspiration and energy might hold out.

Yes, everything was going along just fine. Ratings for the program were at an all-time high and growing. Sales of products were clipping right along. And with the development of additional staff and management capabilities at our production facility in Pittsburgh over the previous couple of years, my commuting out to there from our corporate office in Princeton had dwindled from a weekly trip to a monthly trip. I didn’t mind the other travel—to negotiate business relationships with Hallmark and Golden Books and Random House and CBS or to be the public-speaking voice of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” at conferences of parent groups or early-childhood educators or the White House Conference on Children. Fred wanted nothing more than to stay in Pittsburgh making programs, and I fed my ego on being in front of audiences as the spokesperson for our work and the recipient by proxy of the deep affection people expressed for Fred and the Neighborhood. Yes, life was very, very good.

Then, two months before, had come an ominous call from the newly appointed General Counsel of Sears. I had known his recently retired predecessor, but this was our first conversation with each other. After initial pleasantries, he got to the point:

“Eliot, I have some concerns about the relationship between Sears and your company. Could you come out here so we can discuss it?”

“Sure, but can you give me a headline about what the issue is, so I can prepare for the meeting?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary. It’s pretty simple, really, but not something I want to go into on the phone.”

Several days later I was shepherded into his office high in the Sears Tower, my mind roiling with disaster scenarios. Clearly, this meeting was not going to be about good news.

“So here’s the situation, Eliot,” he began. “I’ve been reviewing a lot of Sears’ relationships since I took over as General Counsel, looking for conflicts of interest. And I think we have one in our relationship with you.” He paused momentarily, then continued: “I have to end it.”

A heavy, dark gray wave flowed over my brain, dimming down my wattage to night-light level. Sears. Millions in production funding. Major vendor of our records and books. Lifeblood. Lifeline. End it? End it? That could end “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”! I groped my way back to the light, to hear what was coming next.

“See, here’s the situation,” he continued. “The Sears-Roebuck Foundation that gives you the millions for producing ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ is a non-for-profit foundation. The money we put into it is tax exempt. As such, it cannot be employed to further our commercial interests or prosperity. It’s a pro bono publico use of funds.”

I nodded in wary comprehension, and he went on.

“But at the same time, we do a land-office business in ‘Mister Rogers’ records in our stores. My concern is that the funds we give for the production of the program could be construed as promoting the sale of ‘Mister Rogers’ products in our stores. If the IRS were to make that determination, it could do all kinds of nasty things like wiping out the Foundation or asking for back taxes on its grants that might have boosted ‘Mister Rogers’ product income, or who-knows-what. I can’t let that happen, and so we have to eliminate the risk.”

On the edge of meltdown, I mumbled, “What did you have in mind?” But I was already composing the words I’d use to tell Fred and the crew that we were out of business.

“Well, it’s pretty simple. You just have to make a choice. Do you want Foundation funding, or do you want Sears to carry your products? It’s one or the other. It just can’t be both.”

Would you rather cut off your right arm or your left arm?

If it had simply been a financial decision, it would have been easier. Take the Foundation funding. It represented more money than the profits from the records. But we regarded our records and other products as “non-broadcast extensions” of the Neighborhood that children could draw on at the precise moments in their life events when they needed the sustenance Fred provides. Shutting off Sears’ sales of these products was tantamount to taking them out of the market. Our record distributor, CBS, was already deeply concerned that most major record chain stores were rapidly squeezing out children’s records in favor of more shelf space for highly promoted hit records by big-name artists. Without Sears, only a handful of off-beat retailers would remain to serve an audience in the millions.

In the end, the decision was painful but clear: keep the Foundation funding and watch Sears take our records off their shelves. We were far more dedicated to maintaining Mister Rogers’ daily TV visits with his young audience than in selling non-broadcast materials. And so with a gulp, that’s what we did. It walloped the business end of Small World Enterprises hard and fast, cutting our revenues by nearly 70% overnight. But I had confidence we would find a way to rebound. We just needed some time.

We were not to get it.

That’s why I found myself bouncing down the rutted roadway in the Beechcraft Bonanza with my silly square-nails sculpture poking me with each jounce as the plane struggled to lift off before the road turned sharply left just ahead.

The night before, CBS’ Vice-President for Children’s Records had called Michael, my own VP overseeing our music business. When the phone rang, I’m sure Michael was initially relieved to hear who was calling. He had been trying vainly for weeks to secure an appointment to discuss the renewal of our contract with CBS that was due to expire in just a matter of days now. His relief would have faded instantly when he was told, “Michael, I’m sorry to tell you this, but CBS has decided to abandon the children’s record business. There’s just not enough money in it any more. We’re stopping manufacture and distribution of ‘Mister Rogers’ records as of today. This division will close by the weekend.”
Now you know why I was in a panic and in a chartered plane out of Abiquiu. Michael managed to reach me late the night before with the lethal news. CBS is dead and gone. There goes our manufacturing capability and our distribution network. Sears has already disappeared as our major vendor. We have no product and no way to reach our customers. What can we do?

I could fly back to Princeton, for starters, and mount a battle plan. Which I did, and though we knew the market for children’s records was in terminal stages of decline, it made sense to reconstruct as best we could a patchwork system for distribution to reach the remaining outlets. Enter Morty Klein.

Morty was a retired veteran of the record industry who happened to live nearby and took kindly to our plight. He stirred himself out of his days of ease in the retirement community to dress for battle everyday with the not-always-honorable denizens of the recording industry. He had built up a phenomenal roster of contacts in the industry, not all of whom were retired like Morty. He worked them tirelessly, looking for an independent manufacturer for our produce and for distribution avenues to get our product to market.

Although in good-humored pessimism Michael insisted, when Morty Klein wasn’t around, on pronouncing his name as “More Decline”, Morty did a phenomenal job virtually overnight. Within days he had found an independent record manufacturer and stitched together a network of local distributors that gave us coverage of the major markets around the U.S. We retrieved the record “masters” from CBS to deliver them to the independent record-pressing manufacturer and put new product into our jerry-built distribution network. Within a month or two, parents were again buying some Mister Rogers records. Our revenues began to recover and it was apparent that our near-death experience wasn’t going to kill us. We just needed a little more time.

We were not going to get it.

How could I have been the president of a company whose revenues depended almost entirely on record sales and not know what records are made of? Perhaps you, understandably, do not know what records were made of and so, now, I can tell you: polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. Well, actually, I did know they were made of PVC. What I didn’t know was what PVC itself was made from.

Oil.

PVC is a petroleum derivative, and so when there is plenty of oil, there is plenty of PVC to make all manner of PVC-based products, including records. And right up until 1973, there was seemingly an endless abundance of oil flowing into the U.S. from a group of countries in the Middle East who organized their sales through something called OPEC. But on October 17, 1973 OPEC announced that it would cease shipping oil to those nations who were supporting Israel during the 20-day long “Yom Kippur War” then at mid-point. The US was one of those nations, and our oil spigot was suddenly shut off tight.

Overnight, the U.S. was in a crisis. No oil. No gasoline. No nothin’. Gas stations limited individual purchases to five gallons. Cars with license plates that ended in even numbers queued up for blocks and hours on even-numbered days to snake their way to the pump in hopes of getting there before the station ran dry for the day, as they often did. Their odd-number-plate neighbors got to join the fun the next day.

Meanwhile, that black goo that was pressed into records, PVC, also disappeared. In short order, we got the inevitable call from Ross, the fine manager of the independent record-pressing manufacturer who was producing our inventory. Michael was out, so I took the call.

“You probably know why I’m calling,” he intoned sympathetically.

By then, I did. Before the OPEC oil embargo I hadn’t had a clue that our product was made from their oil, but I had found out fast as word flew through the industry. Fierce competition and outrageous bidding had broken out among the major record labels scrambling to corner as much PVC as possible to protect their own manufacturing supplies. In an industry famous for its vicious infighting and profligate spending, the war for PVC was ugly and unrelenting.

“We can’t supply you any more, Eliot,” he went on. “We’re having a terrible time getting enough stuff to keep our big customers getting even a trickle of what they need. And while we love working with you guys, we just can’t afford to allocate you any material. We’ve got to keep our big labels happy—well, they’re not going to be happy no matter what, but you know, keep them from punishing us by taking away their business once the supply picks up again. I’m truly sorry.”

I knew he was. And I knew he had to make the decision he did.

We were done for, pure and simple. Three strikes. Sears. CBS. OPEC. All within months of each other. We closed up shop and remanded all the continuing products and revenues over to our not-for-profit sister organization, Family Communications, Inc., which produces the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood television programs. They have proceeded ever since to maintain a low-profile stream of non-broadcast products as an incidental sideline to the main work of FCI—ensuring that young children can visit with their caring friend Mister Rogers and use program-related play to nurture their development.

Over the many years since then, I have striven to rationalize the failure of Small World Enterprises—and my leadership of the company. Being a reasonably inventive fellow, I have produced an abundance of rationalizations that I comforted myself with. Heck, Eliot, you couldn’t possibly have foreseen such a “perfect storm” of devastating factors. To have had those three things hit you all within months is a once-in-a-lifetime tsunami nobody would ever expect to experience—or survive.

And, by the way Eliot, it actually would have been unfortunate if you had succeeded in making the Mister Rogers commercial-products division as successful as, say, the Sesame Street retail bonanza. That would have compromised the primacy of the one-on-one relationship between Fred and each viewing child through the “Neighborhood” TV programs. He is about nurturing personal relationships, with no commercial strings attached. Better off that we didn’t confuse the purity of that mission by selling kids all manner of Mister Rogers’ trinkets.

All true enough. But not the whole truth.

The whole truth includes my own ego and greed. Here I was in my early 30s suddenly president of a company with a famous brand name and a highly respected mission. I was young and hungry, eager and careless. I wanted success. I wanted to make money—lots of it—and I wanted to be known as successful and prosperous. I was driven to escape the demonic memories of a childhood soured by bill collectors asking Mom for “something on the account” and teen years without enough money to go skiing or to the shore or do whatever else the gang was doing. Money. Recognition. Admiration. I wanted them so much. And here I was poised on this incredible springboard, ready to launch myself into the stratosphere of fulfillment. We had the record business already going, and I had brainstormed dozens of additional Mister Rogers products—playthings and books and monthly subscription programs.

I had the vehicle, and I had all the answers. Always ashamed of not having enough money but never in doubt about about the superiority of my mind, I knew it all. Nobody could tell me anything. And I was just smart enough to have, for the most part, ideas that were seemingly plausible and just might succeed. Couple that with my powers of persuasion (and my authority as president of the company), and nobody could tell me anything. I pursued and concluded licensing agreements with the best companies I could find—Hallmark, Random House, Golden Books. They were all impressed with the popularity of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and shared my confidence that Mister Rogers products would fly off the shelves. I was the leader of a band that was just certain there was no way to lose.

Princeton, New Jersey, where I live is the birthplace of market research. George Gallup invented the specialty there in 1936 and, over the years, many of his company’s leading lights spun off to create rival firms right there in town. A super-bright friend of mine headed one such spinoff in the 1970s, and he repeatedly urged me to consider the benefits of doing some research into the market’s interest in “Mister Rogers” products. He wasn’t hustling business. He was a friend, and he was coaching me. Please, please don’t ignore this, he was saying. He didn’t care if I commissioned his firm, or one of his competitors, to do the work—he just knew that I couldn’t make good decisions if I didn’t do a disciplined analysis of the prospective customers and what appealed to them.

I knew he was wrong. I already knew what the customers would like. Because I had dreamed up all these wonderful products. I was off on a free-running high, spinning off idea after idea after idea, drunk with creativity and ambition. How could they not love them if I had dreamed them up?

Well, they found ways.

Product after product languished in the market and was eventually ignored to death. Nothing worked. Nothing.

Had I heeded his advice, I am quite certain it would have been different, and that when the record business collapsed we’d have had sufficient revenues from our non-record products to have weathered the storm. But I didn’t.

In the most supreme irony of it all, I did to Small World Enterprises exactly what an overreaching CEO of Sears did to it some years later: I ignored market research. I never asked the customers what they thought might be a good idea. I got carried away with the wonderfulness of my own thinking—and my lust for success on a grand scale. And I produced exactly the same result.

The ruination of a fine business.

SECOND-STORY MAN

Summer evenings in Fresno are perfect. The slight stirrings of warm air carry the scent of gardenias and orange blossoms, enveloping with fragrant serenity those who sit quietly at poolside or on a redwood deck or in a parked convertible overlooking the river. To be outside on such evenings is to be lulled into endless reverie. Deep into the night, the embrace of this heavenly atmosphere is sustained for languorous hours until eventually dissipated by the suddenly harsh light of sunrise.

Patti and I were married in Fresno, and our first love-nest was a small cottage—once the chauffeur’s quarters—on an elegant estate. Our landlords kindly gave us permission to use their swimming pool while they were away during the summer, their family and staff having retreated to their cabin high in the nearby Sierras to escape the searing heat of Fresno’s daytime sun.

And so late on this particular balmy evening, once it was good and dark, we slipped out of the cottage in our robes and stealthily tiptoed across the lawn to the pool behind the mansion. We lit no lights. We made not a sound. Bare feet on grass. Not even a whispered word. We looked about, checking carefully to reassure ourselves that the massive hedges were effectively screening the yard from the view of any passersby, unlikely though such might have been in a quiet residential neighborhood at a very late hour. But one can never be too careful when about to do something wrong. And make no mistake. We felt very wrong—or at least very racy—about what we were doing it.

We were going to go skinny-dipping.

Okay, so maybe skinny-dipping isn’t really wrong, but tell that to a couple of very young raised-in-the-Fifties newlyweds who were pretty naïve in matters sexual and a bit modest to boot.

So we silently reached the edge of the pool, slipped out of our robes, and eased into the water as stealthily as Indians were always reputed to be able to do it, making nary a ripple. We each leaned away until were floating on our backs, bathed in the warmth of the water, the evening’s scented air, and our love for each other. If heaven could be found in Fresno, California, we knew precisely where it was that evening.

Some timeless moments later, my gaze lazily swept across the blossom-covered rear façade of the darkened mansion. The wrought-iron covered balconies that spanned its breadth were wreathed in jasmine that breathed billows of tender fragrance the stirring air wafted across the broad lawns. Even on this moonless night, the elegance of the design was evident. The son of an architect, I found myself silently admiring the balance of scale and complexity in the interplay between the solidity of the building and the delicacy of that swirling filigree of ironwork and flowering vines. I felt envy for those whose second-floor bedrooms had pairs of French doors opening onto the balcony, through which they would savor the perfume of the blossoms and behold the sweeping lawns and lush gardens of the estate.

The balcony on which I now saw a burglar prying open one of those French doors.

With a start, I splashed in the water to get myself upright and see if my eyes were fooling me. At the sound, the burglar spun around to see where the sudden noise had come from. His movement caught Patti’s eye, and she swiftly worked herself up into a vertical position, treading water next to me.

And there we remained. For an eternity in that fragrant darkness, we and the burglar faced each other down across the broad expanse of dark evening air that separated us. No one moved. No one spoke. No one did anything.

No one wanted to get caught.

For we, nude in someone else’s pool, were not entirely certain at that instant whether he or we might be more in the wrong. So we continued to do nothing but tread water and stare at him.

Eventually, he stepped silently to the balcony railing, swung his leg over it, deftly lowered himself down the wrought iron scrollwork to the ground, and with unhurried steps made his way over to the gate that led through the hedges into the parking yard. Then he was gone.

When we were sure he was gone—really, really sure—we clambered out of the pool, wrapped ourselves wetly in our robes, retreated to the cottage, and called it a night.

HE WHO LAUGHS LAST

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible,” Senor Horchata repeated politely.

I had heard him say it repeatedly, and in my frustration I began to imagine that he was some kind of cretin who lacked the intelligence to do something simple as complete a bank deposit—which was, after all, his job. And so I told and re-told the story of stupid Sr. Horchata for many years, much to the amusement of my friends.

I first encountered Sr. Horchata in the summer of 1966 when I was overseeing a group of students on a summer study program at the University of Madrid. One weekend, we had planned to fly over to Rome for a taste of Italy, and so I had gone to the Banco Hispano-Americano de Madrid to withdraw about a thousand dollars from our account there, which the bank converted to lira for our trip. But, as fate would have it, an airline strike upset our plans, we never went to Rome, I didn’t need the extra money, and I returned to the bank the next Monday to re-deposit the lira.

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible,” said Sr. Horchata steadily. He had been my banker to open the account, proving himself wonderfully gracious and helpful at that time. Now he was parked impassively behind the ornate cast-iron grillework that graced the glowing wooden counters that lined the ornate chamber of the bank, looking slightly dim.

“But Senor Horchata,” I replied, puzzled. “Why?”

“Because these are Italian lira.”

“Yes, and…?” I wondered aloud.

“This is a Spanish bank. Our currency is the peso,” he explained patiently.

“I know. I know,” I noted with increasingly quizzical emphasis. “But what does that have to do with it?”

“You cannot deposit Italian lira in a Spanish bank.”

“But,” I protested, “I got these lira right here. Why can’t I just put them right back in here?”

“Must be pesos,” he said.

“Ah!” I had a brainstorm. “Okay, let’s convert the lira to pesos, and then deposit the pesos into my account.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but that’s impossible.”

By now I’m wondering if he really is dim. I note that on his belt there is a square holster containing a small pot of rubber glue with a brush in it. The stapler and the paper clip obviously had not yet been discovered in Madrid, and all connecting of papers was done by daubing rubber cement in one corner. Piles of deposit slips and other documents lay in piles with the upper left-hand corner inches higher than the others, wadded with this goop.

“Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain to me why that’s impossible,” I managed.

“Because you have a checking account.”

True enough, but what could that possibly have to do with anything?

“And…?”

He explained. “Cash is for cash. Checks are for checks.”

Huh?

“But, but, wait—how does the cash get into checking accounts,” I protested.

“You opened your account with a check, no?” he recalled.

It was true. I had opened it with an American Express travelers check. So suddenly I had the solution.

“Okay,” I proposed, “let’s do this. Take the lira and buy me a travelers check with it, and then deposit that check into my account.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible.”

By now I’m struggling with my patience.

Why?

“Because this is a Spanish bank.”

Couldn’t argue with that statement of fact, but how was it relevant?

“You cannot have a transaction in a Spanish bank that does not involve Spanish currency,” he noted gravely.

My mind was warming to the task. I had him now.

“Okay, Senor Horchata, let’s do this. Convert my lira to pesos, and my pesos to a travelers check, and put that check in my checking account. Okay?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The travelers checks are American Express. Must use American money to buy them.”

Suddenly the pathway was crystal clear: “Okay, okay. I get it. So will you convert my lira to pesos, my pesos to dollars, my dollars to travelers checks, and put those checks in my checking account.”

He considered my proposal thoughfully for a moment, and replied, “Si, Senor.” He went quiet, turned his mind inward, obviously doing some calculations. “Si, Senor Daley. We can do this. It will take one week.”

For years, I entertained my equally superior American friends with this story of stupid and backward Senor Horchata. Then one day it dawned on me that this simple-minded guy Horchata had worked his magna cum laude and summa cum laude triple-degreed gringo customer for about $100 worth of currency-conversion fees to the benefit of his ridiculous, dim-witted, outmoded, rubber-glue bound employer, Banco Hispano-Americano de Madrid.

Probably got himself a commission, to boot.

And a well-deserved laugh.

COPING

I used to snoop on people. For money.

When I began my graduate studies, I needed the money. And so I took a job investingating applicants for insurance. Life insurance. Car insurance. Homeowners’ insurance. The prospective underwriters wanted to understand their level of risk before writing the policies, so they hired people like me to snoop on the applicants.

Did the life-insurance applicants like to sky-dive? Did the car drivers drive drunk? Were the homeowners likely to perpetrate fraud?

I got paid piece-work. So many dollars per report. This made me want to be very, very efficient in my investigations, the better to race back home to the arms of my new bride and, afterward, attend to my studies. I was concerned that each investigation might take so long that the case-rate stipend would become diluted to the equivalent of a low-paying hourly salary.

Not to worry. To my astonishment, a knock on a neighbor’s door and a simple inquiry about the folks next door always unleashed a torrent of information about them. I say “information”, but the facts I was seeking invariably came arrayed within a gloriously effusive oral bouquet of opinion, rumor, bias, data, conjecture, and fantasy. My hardest job was to shut the source up once I had long since secured everything I needed to know, so I could get on with sifting through the whole cockamamie concoction to extract some hard facts to include in my report.

Occasionally, I would have to interview the applicant himself or herself to resolve conflicting information I had gleaned from neighbors. On one such occasion, I found myself knocking early morning on the door of a modest bungalow in a working-class section of Fresno, down by the railyard. The man who opened the door stepped right out of The Grapes of Wrath—clad in ancient bib-overalls over a frayed blue denim shirt, shod in cracked ankle boots, a tattered and sweat-stained straw hat already on his head this early. I knew from the records that he was only in his 40s, but his weathered face and sinewy hands with popping veins under the paper-thin, coffee-tan skin said 75. Years of outdoor work in the sun had taken a toll.

With a friendly smile, he welcomed me into his tiny living room where I took a seat on the frayed sofa while he settled into his favorite chair.

“How kin I hep you, young fella?” he asked.

I explained that the car-insurance company had asked me to get some additional information before issuing a policy to him. That was fine with him, and so I circled around the real question with some warm-up banter about his work. I learned that he worked just down the road at Producers’ Cotton Gin, one of the major agricultural processing industries in Fresno, where they whip the cotton from the cotton seed to ready it for conversion to thread. The leftover cotton seed became cattle feed.

His job was to shovel cotton seed from the massive bins where it was dumped, into burlap bags. That is what he did. All day. Every day. He shoveled cotton seed into burlap bags. All day. Every day. He shoveled cotton seed into burlap bags. All day. Every day. He shoveled cotton seed into burlap bags. In the rain. In the sun. Mostly in the sun, where it roasts everything in sight in Fresno during the summer months. Temperatures over 100 in the shade are common in July and August. But there was no shade where he stood and shoveled cotton seed into burlap bags all day, every day.

I finally got to the issue: “Tell me about your drinking.”

“Well,” he proceeded innocently, “I like to get the day started with a little something.”

Like?

“I usually takes mysef a bit a whiskey to get goin’.”

Say a little more, if you will. Like, how much?

“Well, you know, I guess reg’lar’ly, I pour mysef a water glass full.”

“Straight?!” I blurted in astonishment. I couldn’t imagine someone quaffing a water glass full of pure whiskey without watering it down. But obviously he misunderstood my frame of reference and thought I was referring to the quality of whiskey.

“Well,” he replied wistfully, “straight iff’n I kin afford it. But usu’lly I settle for blend.”

In my younger years when I was snobbish and cruel, I told of that encounter much to the glee of my friends. Now I am ashamed that I could ever have been so lacking in empathy. The point was driven home thirty years later when I had an opportunity to create a computer-based alcoholism treatment program my client wanted to give as a gift to the Soviet Union, to help them cope with their rampant alcoholism.

We knew the computerized program itself was effective. That had been proven sufficiently in the U.S. But I was not sure it would be equally feasible in Russia, so I put the question to a friend of mine who has unparalleled expertise in the world of computers and extensive experience in Russia.

“It’s a non-starter,” she told me. “First off, despite the fact that the Russians have done some extraordinary computer science, there are next to no computers in the whole country.”

“Next to none?” I wondered.

“Would you believe that there are fewer than 200,000 PCs in the entire country? And the competition among scientists and scholars and bureaucrats for time at one of those keyboards is fierce. Alcoholics seeking treatment would never make it onto the priority lists.”

I understood clearly.

“Besides,” she threw in as an afterthought, “I think it might be immoral.”

What, to help alcoholics into recovery? Immoral?

“Yes,” she persisted. In a sad and thoughtful tone, she mused, “Life there is very, very bleak. You just can’t imagine how bleak it is. So I’m not entirely sure that it isn’t an entirely rational decision to get up in the morning and start drinking enough vodka to keep yourself in a state of dim consciousness for the rest of the day.”

The question lingers. I am puzzled to this day about what constitutes quality of life in different cultures and how we cope with life when the quality is too disappointing. Patti and recently returned from a three-week stay in Myanmar, formerly called Burma. Much of our time was in quite rural regions and remote villages where “modern day” advances were completely absent. Not a sign of electricity or internal-combustion engines. Few metal tools, even—hammering done with wooden mallets carved in one piece from teak logs. Materials borne in baskets balanced on women’s heads. (I never did see a man bear a basket on his head.)

Coming to Myanmar from the United States, and as a management consultant no less, I was hard-pressed not to form quick opinions about all the ways things could be done better—i.e., more efficiently. Look at that massive pile of gravel these fifty or sixty women are carrying, basketful by basketful, down to the barge on the river. Why, heck, couldn’t a tractor with a front-loader on it move that whole pile in minutes?

Gradually, better questions formed. And if a tractor did move the pile in minutes, how would those women earn the dollar or two a day they needed to buy food for their families?

Days of observing workers stooped in rice paddies or driving home-made ox carts or flailing bamboo fans to blow the husk off rice kernels teased out my admiring recognition of the ingenuity they displayed in getting the results they needed. Watching the woman lean back against the belt harness around her waist to create the requisite tension on her weaving loom made me smile in appreciation at the generations of invention and refinement being played out before us.

But the most disturbing question that seeped into my mind went beyond the practicalities of earning a day’s wage and producing the food and garments and bamboo huts they required to sustain daily life. I found myself trying to discern whether they were any more or less content with their daily life than others—than Americans or the Brits or the Danes or the Japanese.

The Burmese villagers’ simple life was right before me to see. Squatted together in multi-generational family groups around the small bonfire to cook and eat their breakfast. Off to the fields or the timber for a morning’s work. Gathered again to squat by the fire for lunch. Return for an afternoon’s work. Home for dinner and games and talk and bed.

I was nagged for the entire trip by recalling a remarkable piece of anthropological research done fifty years ago or so. My best recollection is that a multi-cultural team of researchers agreed upon certain observable behaviors that indicated the presence of human happiness. Some that I remember from their list include singing, dancing, eating together, story-telling, playing games, creating art, cuddling children, making love, performing various religious rituals and other celebrations. Once these universal indicators of happiness had been named, the team spread out across the world to observe different cultures and literally count up the prevalence of their occurrence.

The findings were disturbing to this modern American when I first read them back in the 60s, and even more so as I made my way through rural Myanmar villages last month. What had these researchers reported? They found an absolutely inverse correlation between the prevalence of signs of happiness and the degree of industrialization of the culture. The more “advanced” the culture, the rarer the indicators of human happiness. People were seen to be happier in rural Burma than in Baltimore, or Berlin. Happier in polynesia than in Pittsburgh, or Paris. Happier in villages of Africa than in Atlanta, or Amman.

Now there are other considerations, I told myself. If I were to make a list of the things that make me happiest, few would be readily observable by some researcher. Beyond the inaccessibilty of intimate moments, how could they ever know or record what sheer ecstasy I feel when I am writing? Or the continual delight of word play that goes on in my head when I’m bantering with myself or family and other friends? Or the deep satisfaction of mastering a really challenging professional situation? Or the joy of being helpful to someone who’s in a tough spot?

No, it’s not a black-and-white picture. But it was enough to slow me down and make me wonder. Is a day in the rice paddy any worse than a day making telemarketing calls, or working on an assembly line, or driving a tractor? Or shoveling cotton seed? Is a day spent crafting a wooden wheel for an ox cart less satisfying than a day crafting jewelry in New York or a kitchen cabinet for a McMansion?

Perhaps we can get clues from our coping behavior. The rural Burmese enhanced their happiness—or coped with their boredom?—by chewing betelnuts all day, just as others elsewhere started their day with straight whisky or a jiggers of vodka. But those are the coping tools of people with limited expectations.

I am more intrigued by the coping behavior of people with seemingly limitless possibilities, who seem to deliberately look the other way and distract themselves from life’s opportunities and challenges. I wonder why Americans in particular seem so addicted to distractions from life. We devote much—most?—of our waking hours to living vicariously through the affairs of others. Television and films, of course, transport us away from interactions with our real families and invest our minds in those of pretend people, or real people in pretend situations. As a people, we spend more hours with these fictional folks and places than in conversation with our families. What is the meaning of this?

Or the meaning of identifying so passionately with sports heroes? Millions of Americans seemingly worship professional sports teams, living and dying emotionally with their successes and failures. Why would someone wear a garment with someone else’s name splashed all across the back of it—Brady or Earnhardt or Shaq? Really, why would they? What’s going on here? Does this specious connection with a celebrity inspire and enhance their own possibilities for authentic personal achievement, or distract from it, consigning them forever to an also-ran, wanna-be mentality?

A sophisticated leather goods company in New York City used to run ads for its lovely logo-free products, and the tag line was “When your own initials are enough.” Sadly, inevitably, those ads no longer run, because the company eventually resigned itself to stamping its own logo on its goods. No doubt they observed would-be customers preferring to bear the names and images of Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger than settle for their own.

A New Yorker cartoon conveyed the now-obsolete alternative. A distinguished looking man dressed in a three-piece suit and Homburg hat is standing in a haberdashery, looking disdainfully at a display of logo-splashed shirts. He sniffs to the clerk, “One supposes that if Mother and Father had wished for me to wear the monogram of Yves St. Laurent, they would have named me Yves St. Laurent.”

We only have so much mind so use. Marketers know this, and have a term they use—“mind share”—to describe the war for people’s attention. At this point in our history, the largest share of mind in America seems to have been captured by entertainment, rather than working on the improvement of our lives and society. While a hardy few labor on community volunteer programs and political activism, the vast majority spend the vast majority of their time being “entertained” in high-tech home theaters, not to mention iPods and GameBoys and other tools to deflect us from our own reflective thinking and from each other. Media addiction seems to be our mainline drug-of-choice, like blended whiskey or vodka or betelnuts are to others.

It feels tragic to me. More tragic than the alcoholism of a guy who shovels cotton seed all day every day. Tragic, because what we absorb from our fixation on media makes it ever less likely that we will bestir ourselves in constructive ways to heal the ills of our society.

Why? Because the media distort our understanding of reality, and so lead either to unnecessary escape from it or to flawed solutions to misperceived problems that only make matters worse.

I began to understand this pernicious effect of the media—especially television—many years ago when I read a number of studies on the effects of the medium. One in particular has stayed with me vividly.

A number of people were asked something like the following question: “If you were walk out of your home tonight at 10PM and stroll for a half mile in any direction, what are the odds that you would become the victim of a violent crime?”

The answers varied wildly, from one chance in five or ten, to one chance in five or ten thousand.

The researchers knew the responders’ addresses, of course, and they knew the actual violent-crime statistics in the area surrounding their homes. So they were able to correlate the respondents’ estimates with the real facts.

For starters, everyone overestimated the danger by a very significant factor. People were far more fearful of their own neighborhood than they had any reason to be. But then came the kicker.

The researchers had also asked, “How much television do you watch?”

The heavy TV viewers were vastly more unrealistic about the dangers than the light TV viewers. By “vastly”, I mean by a factor of hundreds, even thousands. My best recollection is that the variance was something like this: the heavy TV watcher thought the odds of being harmed were one in five while they were actually one in 50,000 (too fearful by a factor of 1,000), while the light TV watcher thought they were one in 10,000 when they really were one in 50,000 (off by a factor of five).

It would be tragic enough if any individual had to live more fearfully than necessary. Nobody should have to dim the lights of joy and aspiration and fellowship. We were born to exult, not to cower.

But of course it doesn’t stop with personal retreat. If people really believe that they are in dire danger, that affects how they think and how they vote. Build more prisons. Defeat gun-control laws. Relinguish rights to privacy and other freedoms. Let’s shoot first and ask questions later, whether in Watts or Iraq. So what if we make some lethal errors? The bad guys are all around us, and we have to do whatever it takes to make us safe and secure.

There is another side-effect of our addiction to the media and the soporific stupor of inactivity that entails. The less we actually do together—fixing things, changing things, building things—the less capable we are of doing what needs to be done. Our skills and our willpower atrophy synchronously. Thus we see the astounding ineptitude of “the most powerful nation on earth” as it fails to field an army prepared for battle with proper armaments, or to evacuate the population of a city devastated—with advance notice—after levees crumble. The country that mobilized millions in uniform and transformed automobile plants into factories producing thousands of airplanes and tanks within mere months of Pearl Harbor flounders in pathetic ineptitude, for want of people up on the balls of their feet charging into the future with imagination and determination.

How could we have let our governmental sinew atrophy? How could we have lost our pride so completely? Why is there no outrage from shore to shore, demanding better for our troops (even in a wrongheaded engagement) and for our suffering fellow citizens in New Orleans?

And why do we nod numbly at federal budget numbers widely acknowledged to be utterly fictitious? Why are we content to further impoverish the poor and further enrich the rich? Why do we permit 45,000,000 of our fellow citizens to show up at hospital ERs as medical beggars, without an iota of the health care coverage the rest of us shiver to think might ever be curtailed?

I think we’re just preoccupied with illusory entertainments, interspersed with incredibly effective propaganda from the powers-that-be who know for certain that few if any of us will bestir ourselves to check the facts and blow the whistle on their cunning deceit. A bumper sticker on the car of our oldest daughter and her husband reads, “If you’re not outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.” That says it all.

In a relatively pure democracy like ours, as our other daughter’s husband once wrote, we get exactly the government we deserve. With fewer than half of the eligible citizens bothering to vote in U.S. national elections, we wind up being governed by those who best persuade but a quarter of us that they will mollify our fears and humor our fantasies of financial security. We’ll take care of the bad guys and not ask you to pay for any societal improvements. How about that? It’s all good.

I know from personal experience the power of addictions. I am a food addict. But I have never before witnessed—as I believe I am today—an entire nation addicted to a self-defeating delusion which will lead, as all addictions do, either to a premature end or, more hopefully, to a desperately “low bottom” which brings the addict crashing down in such revulsion at their own behavior that they are absolutely impelled to seek a path of recovery.

For the sake of my grandchildren and their children, I wish I felt more optimistic about the outcome.

Addictions are a way of coping with something presumably less pleasant that being trapped in the addiction itself. If only I could figure out what our national addiction is supposed to be protecting us from…

And if only I could find a way to be part of the solution.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

The men who work on the railroad weren’t going to be impressed by my college-kid intellect and ostentatious vocabulary. A different set of values dominated here. I could tell that the first day on the job. These guys were really a clan, a family, and it was immediately apparent that I hadn’t been born to the clan. They all wore blue bib overalls, ankle-high black boots, blue denim workshirts, and grey-striped mattress-ticking caps with a pleated crown, like a low-profile industrial version of a chef’s toque. They all wore them. The only difference was in the relative newness of each man’s gear.

And they all carried the same black metal lunchbox, shaped like a loaf of bread with a handle on top. Thermos of coffee clipped into the lid, two bologna and cheese sandwiches and a wax paper bag of potato chips down below. Maybe pimento loaf instead of bologna for a change of pace. Sometimes a pyrex dish of pudding, too, or a couple of cookies.

I was a hotshot freshman in college, and these were definitely not my kind of guys. But I was going to do my damndest to obscure that fact. Because I also knew they could make it a long, difficult summer for me if I gave them reason to.

So I made up my mind, first day, that I was going to adopt a strategy of protective coloration. Whatever their prevailing interests and tone of conversation, I would do my best to ape them. I would wear their clothes, eat their lunch, feign interested conversation about their favorite TV shows or bowling league or whatever. The more I thought about it, the more I warmed to the challenge. I would prove privately to myself that I could be and do anything I wanted.

Wrong.

But it took a couple of weeks before the truth emerged. The first week I was kept busy in training, learning the ropes of being a brakeman and switchman for the Southern Pacific Railway Company. “SP” had a major switching depot in Fresno where thousands of cars a day were jockeyed and coupled into mile-long trains that rattled and rumbled off through the flat expanses of the San Joaquin Valley. Some headed south to Los Angeles where they bent east through the southern tier of states. Others rolled north to San Francisco, Salt Lake, Chicago, New York. The traffic swelled in size and urgency in the summer with the surge of crop-laden refrigerator cars headed East with their highly perishable cargoes of melons and peaches and grapes and lettuce.

We spent a little time learning the how to set switches and brakes, and a lot of time learning how not to get killed doing it.

The job is simple enough. The railyard was a vast sea of tracks running beside each other, sprawling for a mile or more in either direction. The heart of it was ribboned with perhaps forty or fifty parallel sets of tracks that pinched together, like the striations on a corn husk, at the far ends of the yard. What gradually braided them together at either end was a maze of switches, knitting rail to rail to rail to rail until eventually only a single set of silver beams made off across the flatlands for distant cities.

From the yardmaster’s perch high in his tower, he looked on a scene that spread away in all directions like a giant’s plaything, a grand table for shuffling toy cars around. Before him was a chart specifying the rules of the game for today, the moves to orchestrate as each train was made up for its journey. Pull that empty coal car off the end of track nine so you can pluck these six reefers from behind it. Stash the coaler out of the way over on sixteen. Get the reefers from nine, park them for a minute on ten; get those two flatcars from sixteen and put them on nine, then splice the first three reefers in behind the two flatcars we got from sixteen, since they get dropped in Kansas City, before the reefers for Chicago. Then go back for the other three reefers which are going only as far as Salt Lake.

It is a simple job, but I have given a super-simplified version. Now, multiply that choreography about a hundredfold, and you get the idea of life in the switching yard. Many trains, once fully made up, stretched for a mile or more from locomotive to caboose—every car plucked from some remote location usually buried behind thirty or forty irrelevant cars, to be patched into the chain at the just the right place.

All day long and all night long, back and forth, in and out, long-haul locomotives, yard-bound switch engines, boxcars of auto parts, flatcars creaking under the weight of massive generators strapped to their backs, refrigerator cars packed with chilled produce, hopper cars laden with chemical fertilizers, tank cars top-heavy with crude oil—the endless shuffle went on, twenty-four hours a day. When night fell no one noticed, the huge yard kept in daylight by massive stadium-type floodlights so trainmen in their cabs and dispatchers in their high towers could read the identifying marks on the cars and keep those ponderous marathon dancers changing partners until dawn.

A simple job, but tedious, endless, and dangerous for those on the ground. Everyone carries a picture in their mind of the friendly engineer leaning out the window of the cab, waving as he cruises past the crossing or through the station. And the fireman in the cab with him, doing whatever firemen do now that they no longer stoke coal into firepits to make steam. But in the middle of it all, down there on the ground, the brakemen and switchmen go about their anonymous work.

Whenever a locomotive reached a closed switch, someone had to get down out of the cab and walk ahead to throw the switch to shift from one track to another. And someone had to stand beside the track at the tail end of the train, perhaps a half mile away from the locomotive, to signal to the engineer—arm-waving by day, lantern by night—how much farther to back up until the last linked car made contact with the next car to be tied on the tail end. Someone had to scramble aboard each car, sprint up the ladder to the top, and spin the iron wheel that would lock the brakes on a car to be parked or unlock them on a car to be moved.

Worst of all, somebody had to step between those monstrous railroad cars to make sure every set of the massive iron couplings was fully latched.

In a yard where dozens of trainmen are throwing thousands of signals to each other in the course of an eight-hour shift that couple and uncouple hundreds of cars, there is always a chance of a signal’s being misread—and an engineer’s setting the train in motion while a brakeman or switchman is pinned between two cars checking the coupling. When that happens, the movement of the train is surprisingly sudden and the time for escape horrifyingly brief. Although railroad cars are enormous and heavy, and the laws of inertia would suggest that such ponderous resting objects want to remain at rest a long time, there is a contrary dynamic that makes the movement of rail cars sudden and dramatic, all the more so in direct proportion to their distance from the locomotive.

This is the accumulated-slack factor. Each coupling between railroad cars has about four to six inches of play in it, a cushion of flexibility required by these pairs of massive steel jaws that need room to grope for and grab each other with only approximate precision as they rock and sway on the tracks. But once contact is made, they must also clench closed like a pair of monstrous fists with enough clunky tenacity to bear the weight of every car between then and the caboose.

The accumulated slack sets up a predictable but dangerous dynamic. When a locomotive pulling a train comes to a firm halt, all the cars behind it come to rest hard against the coupling of the car in front of them. This squeezes all the slack out of all the couplings in that direction. So, when the locomotive starts up again, it re-opens the slack in each coupling, one car at a time starting with the first car behind the locomotive, before that coupling catches hold at the opposite end of its slack span and begins to move the car behind it. Multiply six inches of slack by, say, sixty cars, and this means that the locomotive will have moved thirty feet or so and gained a head of steam before the whiplash effect hits the sixtieth car. No matter what the laws of inertia say about resting objects wanting to remain at rest—even big, heavy boxcars—when that sixtieth car gets belted with the combined forward-moving inertia of a locomotive and fifty-nine other cars, it will leap thirty feet ahead like a hot rod coming off the line at a drag strip.

This is not a good time to be standing between cars number fifty-nine and sixty.

Or to be standing on top of either of them.

There are other perils to being on the ground at a railyard. Anybody who has ever walked along a railroad track knows it’s a lousy place to walk. The stones of the roadbed are large and sharp, constantly offering a twisted ankle or off-balance stumble to the careless. The ties seemingly offer more congenial footing—but they turn out to be spaced too closely or too widely for a comfortable stride. Worse, they are necessarily laid directly in the path of trains.

And so we spent a lot of time on safety measures, like how to keep that rocky footing from pitching you under the wheels of a train during manuvers. When you jump off a moving train, you cling to the outside of the car facing the train, splayed out like a spider, then swing your forward foot up behind your other calf in a mid-air curtsy, push out with a half-spin away in the direction the train is moving, and land on that foot first. The natural action of your body atop that foot strike will launch you away from the train, rather than under it.

Other tricks of the trade followed—how to jump aboard a moving train, how to spot overheated wheel bearings called “hot boxes”, how to ignore your ears.

Ignoring you ears is particularly important.

You’d think that your ears would be a critically important safety factor in a railyard where you are surrounded by constantly moving equipment. But that’s just the problem—the constant movement. If you listen for the sound of a train approaching, hear it, confirm its location, and then step across a track it is not on—wham! That’s just when you get hit by the train whose own sound was masked by the train you saw, the one you thought accounted for all the noise. The noise is so constant your ears became irrelevant at best, lethal betrayers at worst. It’s like the old axiom about people who live next to the railroad tracks coming not to notice the noise of the trains after a while. What serves as a merciful tuning-out for those nearby residents becomes an occupational hazard for a trainman. Eyes. Everything depends on fast eyes, always scanning, always doubting, always scheming escape routes.

I learned my lessons well. I did not get killed. I did not come close to injury. I even put my new survival skills into practice, never dreaming this practice would lead to my downfall as a railroader.

The usual pattern in the switchyard was for the engineer to bring the train to a full stop about twenty yards short of a switch that needed to be thrown. The brakeman or switchman would clamber down from the cab, walk forward, throw the switch, and then hop back aboard the cab as it inched past over the open switch.

Not this eager beaver. I knew how to jump from a moving train, didn’t I? And how much sense did it make, after all, to bring that whole monstrous business—locomotive, tender, boxcars and all—to a complete stop just to open a switch? Surely I could add a little efficiency to the process.

So I took to leaping from the train about a hundred yards short of the switch while it was still rolling along at a speed faster than a walk but slower than my fastest clip over rocky terrain. I would hit the ground running, sprint clumsily ahead to the switch, throw it, stand proudly beside it as the train kept rolling through, and then leap aboard as the cab passed. What a good team player I was indeed! And how I was improving the efficiency of our whole crew!

But neither the engineer nor the fireman in the cab congratulated me on my innovative contribution to the team effort. The first few days, there was no comment at all. Then, a question surfaced about the unnecessary danger to me of jumping from a moving train. No problem, I countered. I always follow the approved safety training pattern for jumping. I felt good that they cared about me. My campaign to become one of them must surely be working.

Later, the engineer of them voiced concern about my twisting my ankle running along the rocky roadbed. That’d put me out of action for the rest of the summer, he cautioned, and I sure didn’t want to miss out on a summer’s wages, did I, what with college expenses to cover in the fall and all that.

Gee. They really did care.

After about the tenth leap-and-switch on one particular day, I was standing next to the thrown switch waiting for the train to roll through so I could swing back aboard the cab. But instead of rolling on through, the locomotive slowed inexplicably and shuddered to a stop right beside me. All the cars behind it came clattering to a rest one against another. Puzzled, I climbed the steps up into the cab.

The engineer lifted himself with menacing deliberateness off his black leatherette stool at the window of the cab and fixed me with a fierce look that spoke hatred. I know that’s a strong word, hatred, but that’s what I saw in his eyes. He advanced on me across the narrow cab and I backed into a corner. I shot a glance toward the fireman who was making a successful effort to preoccupy himself elsewhere. The engineer, a stocky, muscular man of fifty, crowded up to me as I backed against the firewall studded with gauges. I could feel the rims of the gauges pressing into my back as I did my best to melt into the surface.

Was he going to swing at me? I had little maneuvering room and would have a tough time throwing a punch myself from my awkward position against the bulkhead. If he did take a poke, should I just cover up and hope for the best? Tackle him? Try to knee him in the groin?

He slugged me with his words instead.

“What the hell are you trying to prove, you stupid shithead?”

My mind ricocheted around wildly trying to make sense of what I was hearing. Trying to prove . . . ? Well, I . . . what do you mean?

“You’re trying to make us look bad, aren’t you, smartass college boy! Running. Running. Want to make us look lazy, dontcha!”

No, wait, I thought frantically. You’ve got it all wrong. It’s just the opposite. I’m going out of my way trying to look just like you. And I am doing so wonderfully well at it, aren’t I? Why, my private goal is even to make you forget I’m a college boy. I bought these stupid Oshkosh bib overalls and have gone so far as to mothball all those four- and five-syllable words I take such great pride in using in the classroom.

“Get your ass up topside!”

Huh? What?

“Topside, stupid. You know what topside is, dontcha?”

I climbed the ladder up the side of the locomotive to the roof of the cab, not knowing what might possibly come next. Would he start the train again and take it up to high speed, hoping I’d tumble off? Or was this the equivalent of being sent to sit in the corner with a dunce cap, except here it meant exposure to the blazing sun atop an overheated black locomotive? What was coming?

He was.

Once I was topside, I heard his boots clambering on the iron rungs and saw the top of his cap. His face emerged and then the rest of him, still tense with hatred. He pulled himself erect, squared his shoulders, and lifted his right arm slowly as though aiming a pistol at me. I looked steadily at his hand pointed straight at my head, trying to reassure myself that I was correct in my impression that it did not in fact contain a pistol.

All I saw was an accusing finger which, after a silent eternity suffused with his anger, he slowly swung away from me to sweep the horizon. He scribed a 360-degree arc, a heavy-footed, slow-motion pirouette on the roof of the cab of the locomotive in the middle of the Southern Pacific railyard in Fresno, California. His movement was almost magisterial, like the Pope spreading a benediction over the teeming masses in Vatican Square.

I followed his sweep, taking in the vast sprawl of railroad cars lined up row upon row, fanning out clear into the surrounding farmlands, studded here and there with yardmaster towers keeping watch like scarecrows and with spindly light standards sprouting huge blooms of bulbs at their tips.

The engineer snapped me back to the moment. “See all them cars out there?” he barked.

Yessir.

“Think we’ll get ‘em all switched out on our shift?”

No, sir.

“No matter how hard we work, think we’ll have to leave a few for the fellas on the next shift?”

Yessir.

He bit off and spat out each word of his final sentence, drove it into my face, each one a bullet intended to splatter in my brain: “Then… just… what… the… hell… difference… does… it… make… exactly… how… many… we… leave… them, anyhow!”

Three days later I received a registered letter at home bearing the curt message that my services were no longer required by the Southern Pacific Railway Company.

Grace intervenes in curious ways.

THERE BUT FOR…

Mr. Willey. I have Mr. Willey to thank for the fact that I am not writing from a jail cell, and that what I’m writing is not my umpteenth appeal for re-trial written over the past five decades. Instead, I sit in my cozy study situated in a garden at the rear of our property, and it’s about how mistaken identity can get you a lifetime of imprisonment.

It was a rainy night in Fresno, just a few days before Christmas. After filling people’s gas tanks, checking their dipsticks, and putting a squeegee to their windshields for six hours after school at Fresno High across the street, I finished my shift at the gas station and closed the place up. Since it was only about ten o’clock, I decided to drive down to hang out with my high school buddy Greg at the Tower District toy store where he was working late in the back room, assembling bikes and wagons and scooters that would delight kids all over town when they appeared under Christmas trees in a couple of days. We shot the breeze and I helped him a bit for an hour or two, and then I headed for home.

Rainy days were great for spinning tires. We California teenagers loved to spin our tires, but only the guys with the real hot rods had enough horsepower to spin them on dry pavement, splitting the air with an intertwined howl of exhaust pipes and screeching rubber that sounded to our ears a symphony of testosterone.

The rest of us had to wait for wet pavement.

So I left the toy store in my dad’s 1948 Buick two-door sedan full of eager anticipation for some tire-sizzling starts as I dreamed about peeling out from each stop sign and doing some dirt-track-style broadsliding around the corners that lay between the Tower District and home four miles away. It was midnight, the streets were deserted, and I expected non-stop thrills. I wasn’t disappointed. Revving the engine to full RPM at the first stop sign, I popped the clutch and heard through the open window in the driver’s door a whizzing spin from the rear tires that put a tingle in my crotch. A hard left at speed off Olive Street onto Maroa Avenue slid the car into a four-wheel drift through the empty intersection that would have made Juan Fangio proud.

And so I made my way toward home, zig-zagging an intentionally indirect route around this block and that, so that I would miss no opportunity to come to a halt at another stop sign where I could peel out or to catch another slippery corner where I could bend the Buick sideways, repeating the thrill over and over again.

By the time I got around the big sweeping curve from Weldon onto Van Ness Boulevard, I knew my thrills were about over. From there, it was pretty much a straight shot the rest of the way to my house, and so after straightening the car out from that last high-speed turn, I settled down to a fifty-mile-an-hour pace—double the posted speed limit—that would carry me for several miles down that sedate stretch of roadway flanked with the most stately homes in Fresno in the 1950s.

It was then that I noticed in my rear-view mirror the jiggle of headlights many blocks back. Car-crazy kids in California in the ‘50s could tell you a lot from what appeared in their rear-view mirrors at night. Anybody worth their salt could certainly tell you the make and year of the car behind them, of course, from the placement of the headlights—big or small, high or low, widely spaced or closer together—combined with the way the beams of light glinted on the chrome on the trim rings around the headlight lenses, on the protruding grille, and on the uprights on the bumper. And you could tell at a distance how fast the car was coming on.

A car whose headlights jiggled was coming on fast as hell. Really fast. Too fast for the springs and shock absorbers to react and dampen the roughness in the road, jarring the whole car in relentless little reverberations. Jiggling headlights? Fast. Really, really fast. Like maybe a hundred.

So I instinctively slid over toward the curb and slowed just a bit to ensure that whoever was barreling down Van Ness Boulevard at midnight at a hundred—there was a good chance it was my buddy Greg, who lived on the Boulevard farther out—could blast past me with plenty of margin for error. But as the car rapidly closed on me, it too shifted toward the curb in alignment with me and was suddenly ablaze with flashing red lights and shrieking a siren that pierced the still night.

There is a direct connection between red lights and sirens behind me, and a galvanic skin response in my body. The prickles tingle all over my arms and the goose bumps leap to attention everywhere, my scalp ripples in spontaneous sympathetic consternation, and my heart revs up to a manic drumbeat. It all comes from too many years of too many pranks that warranted punishment and too much wanton lawbreaking behind the wheel. Whenever I see a cop even today, I know I’ve been guilty of anything the officer might take a notion to charge me with.

So I drew to a stop at the curb, instantly computing how many offenses would appear on the ticket—speeding and reckless driving, to be sure, but God only knew what else he might nail me for. And the way the cop car had come screeching to a shuddering stop, just inches behind my rear bumper, telegraphed an aggressiveness that supercharged my imagination of how bad it might be. I was sure he was pissed. I somehow knew not to expect the officer to approach my door with the studied casualness I had observed on previous occasions when a policeman pulled me over—the I’ve-got-you-now stroll and pursed-lips expression of disgust the cops must have actually practiced as rookies before being sent out into the real world to make their way time and again to the driver’s door of an apprehended vehicle with that unemotionally insistent request for license and registration.

But I was not prepared to see both doors flung open, two cops spilling out and rushing toward my car in a crouch—with their guns drawn. They stopped on either side just behind the doors, and the one on my side shouted through my open window, “Get out with your hands up! Now!” There was a note of near hysteria in his voice.

Oh shit. My hair went electric. My mind lurched momentarily toward meltdown. My palms were instantly wet. Not damp. Wet. All in a couple of seconds.

“I said NOW!” he screamed. “NOW!”

My slippery left hand found the door handle and unlatched it, and I pushed the door open with my arm and foot. I had barely begun to emerge, my feet just touching the ground, when he grabbed me by the bicep and yanked hard, jerking me up and out, and then spinning me face-first against the side of the car. By that time, his partner had dashed around from the far side of the car, and the two of them dragged and skidded me toward the hood, where they pushed me forward and splayed me face down. Hard. They kicked my feet well apart, and pinned my arms behind me. A heavy forearm kept the side of my face mashed against the wet hood of the Buick, pressing hard enough to hurt a lot. Some jostling behind me, a little metallic clatter, sharp pain as my hands were seized up and twisted into handcuffs that cut into my wrists.

“I hope you’re satisfied with yourself, you little son-of-a-bitch!” shrieked the voice connected to the forearm. The adrenaline-charged forearm pumped harder on my head a couple of times as he yelled, for emphasis. The metal on the hood buckled slightly under my cheekbone with each fresh shove.

“Look what I found,” called his partner from the rear of Dad’s car. He had opened the trunk and I could see from my mashed-face position looking backward across the hood that he was holding up the trophy that would seal my fate.

Back in those days, maybe dashboard gas gauges weren’t as accurate as they are today, or perhaps gas stations weren’t as ubiquitous. That’s all I can figure for why the trunk of everybody’s car contained a red metal can containing a gallon of gas, just in case. But they did. Everybody had one. On that fateful rainy night on Van Ness Boulevard in Fresno, however, the can in my dad’s trunk was empty. Who knows what had become of the contents. Maybe he’d used it in the lawn mower, or I’d used it to help torch the bonfire for a pep rally at the high school, or something. Anything. Who knows. All that mattered was that this red can was empty, and it would be Exhibit A at my trial.

“They took an old man out of that house, you little bastard, and he may not make it!” the face-masher shrieked at me again. I, his presumed perpetrator, had been totally subdued, but he made no effort to subdue himself, charged up to a fever pitch by the combination of the adrenaline-pumping high-speed interception and the horror of the crime he was avenging.

By now his partner was beside him, behind me and out of my very limited smooshed-up field of view along the Buick’s hood. He leaned over me and snarled right close to my ear, “You are fucked.”

I had no cause to disagree with him.

With that, the face-masher’s forearm let up the pressure on my head, and somebody yanked on the handcuffs chain, pulling me backwards off the hood. Hot, sharp spears of pain shot through my shoulders as the cop jerked my cuffed arms way up behind me at an angle well beyond where they were ever intended to flex. I was jolted by an instant surge of panic to relieve the agony but somehow resisted reacting violently, knowing that might get me shot. I staggered to catch my balance and stand up straight to ease the torch of pain. As I did, they spun me around and backed me up against the fender, to get their first good look at this miserable lowlife they had nailed.

“You…are…fucked,” the one repeated, punctuating each word by jabbing the empty gas can in my face three times. “Fucked! You hear me?”

I did. And I still believed him.

Then Mr. Willey came along. There wasn’t normally much traffic on Van Ness Boulevard at midnight, and his was the first car to come along since I became fucked. He was cruising along comfortably within the speed limit, presumably because he could see the flashing red lights many blocks in advance and chose to mind the 25MPH speed limit everybody usually ignored. His unaccustomed leisurely pace certainly accounted for why he was able to recognize my dad’s car, and me, as he rolled past in the damp darkness.

So he pulled over, and then he slowly backed up until he was stopped right in front of the Buick.

The policemen eyed his Cadillac warily as it eased toward us, but they were instantly relieved when the recognized the man who emerged. Mr. Willey was a prominent attorney in Fresno, in the ‘50s a small town where the local police and the local attorneys all knew each other very well from many, many years of interacting in courtrooms and station houses where they amiably determined the fate of the guilty and the innocent who came to their mutual attention. He moved casually toward us.

“Evening, Tim. Bob. How’re you boys tonight?” Mr. Willey greeted them.

“Evening, Mr. Willey.” they chorused. Lawyers were “Mister” to the police out of respect, the same reason he was “Mister Willey” to me as the father of one of my friends. I had spent countless hours at the Willey home and in their backyard pool, and we sailed together regularly on Lake Millerton in the foothills.

“Looks like you got yourself a bad guy,” he deadpanned. Despite my petrified and deranged state of mind at the moment, I instinctively recognized a friend setting to work. “What’s the story?”

“This son-of-a-bitch torched a house down in the Tower District. An old man was in it—burned real bad, probably won’t make it,” one of them summed up.

“Yeah,” the other chimed in, “caught the bastard red-handed trying to get away. Drove like a bat out of hell but we got him. Look at this.” He held up the empty red gas can. “And he’s got gas all over his clothes. You can smell it on him.”

It was true. I never finished a shift at the station without reeking of gasoline that splashed out of overfilled spouts in those days before automatic shut-off valves.

And as I learned from the paper the next day, the old man didn’t make it. Arson, and murder.

“Well, boys,” Mr. Willey eased into it, “I think you did a real good job.”

“Thanks, Mr. Willey,” one said while the other nodded.

“But I think you still got some more work to do,” he added.

They looked quizzically at him.

“I know this kid pretty well,” Mr. Willey continued. “Well, actually, really well. And I can tell you he didn’t do it.”

They looked both puzzled and disappointed, but needing more.

“Name’s Eliot Daley. Good friend of my boy Rod’s. His parents are Jad and Nan Daley, out on Palm, corner of Indianapolis. You may know ‘em. Good people. Fine people.”

They were nodding in time with his cadence.

“Now Eliot’s no saint. You know kids,” he added confidentially. They nodded some more. “But he’d never do something like that.”

One of them nodded again, but the face of the other wrinkled up like a week-old baked potato, and he began shaking his head in fast little negations, all discombobulated.

“But lookit him, Mr. Willey,” he protested. “Dark pants, white shirt just like somebody said. Covered with gas. And driving like hell to get away from there. And this,” waving the prized red can at Mr. Willey.

All true. Levis and white tee shirts were our uniform as teenagers. And they didn’t yet know where the gas on my clothes came from.

“Eliot pumps gas down at Chet’s station on the bend,” Mr. Willey explained. “Covers the night shift. I’m guessing he’s still in his work gear.”

I nodded. I could not produce any sound whatsoever with my voice. I didn’t even try.

Minutes later, still never having spoken a word, I was sitting behind the wheel of Dad’s Buick, little contortions twitching my limbs, spasms of relief shuddering through my central nervous system. Mr. Willey and the two cops were bantering familarly beside Mr. Willey’s big Cadillac before he slipped inside. The rain had stopped. They chatted away while I fumbled with the ignition switch, too shaken to be smooth about anything. I got the engine fired up after a couple of cranks. The car jerked and lurched when my quivering left leg clumsily let out the clutch to pull away from the curb toward home. I drove very slowly all the way to our driveway, tentative, groping along as though for the first time at the wheel.

I tumbled onto my bed still in my gas station clothes, twisted fitfully a while in anguished fantasies of what almost was, and finally fell asleep thinking how many men must be in jail because Mr. Willey had not come along.

I still think about it.

FIRING GLORIA

I realized I had no choice but to fire her.

I didn’t want to. God knows, I didn’t want to. I was a young man in my first managerial position and, never having fired someone before, I didn’t know what to do or to expect.

And, at that peak moment of racial tension in the U.S. in 1970, she happened to be the only woman of color in our office.

But I had tried everything I could think of to help her improve. Sent her to secretarial courses. Had the office manager tutor her. Changed my own work demands to fit within her inadequate skill set. But nothing worked. Mistakes and errors and missed deadlines were the norm, and nothing she produced could be released into the mail or a colleague’s hands until it had been slavishly reworked, over and over again, to repair the original defects—and to detect and repair the new ones that crept into each corrective revision. The simplest one-page letter was a day-long production, taking nearly as much of my time as it did of hers. Enough, already!

So I called Gloria into my office. We sat in a pair of chairs facing each other. I told her it just wasn’t working, and that I was going to have to let her go.

Gloria sprang from her chair as a tiger leaping from a crouch and flung herself at me, teeth bared, eyes flaring, claws extended and flailing at my face, shrieking in fury. I felt her fingernails rake down my cheeks and the blood make her fingers suddenly slippery, She was a frenzy of assault, kicking at my shins and ripping at my face and pounding on chest, all the while shattering the room with her screams of outrage.

I instinctively drew up my knees and covered my head and face with my arms as best I could, huddled in a kind of fetal position on my chair. I knew I couldn’t just leap up and engage her in a fist fight, ending her attack by knocking her out or something, but I was doing a very poor job of warding off her blows. I frankly didn’t have a clue about what to do, and Gloria was still whaling away at me when Marcia, the office manager came rushing in to find out what the noisy ruckus was all about. Small but mighty, Marcia instantly grabbed Gloria from behind, wrapping her arms around Gloria and simultaneously pinning Gloria’s arms to her sides as she pulled her off me. Gloria struggled as the two of them lurched around the office, but Marcia held firm and after a little while Gloria, unable to break Marcia’s immobilizing grip around her, ceased her twisting attempts to wrench free.

As Gloria relaxed her gyrations, Marcia gradually eased her grip. Breathing heavily, they separated just a bit—and suddenly Gloria broke free and ran from the room, running madly down the hallway toward the front door. I knew instantly where she was headed. Across the street, to the studio where “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was in production. She was going after Fred next.

I picked up the phone and called Elaine, Fred’s assistant, and told her that Gloria was charging that way with blood in her eye. And so Fred prepared for her arrival in the way that only Fred Rogers might have awaited someone in that condition. Not in fear. Not in a protective posture of self-defense. Not in anything but deep concern for what in the world might be possessing Gloria to be in such pain.

By the time Gloria ran flailing and stumbling across the street, down the block, and through the labyrinth of corridors, studios, and offices that led to Fred’s corner nook at the rear of the building, she was spent. She tumbled into his arms in tears, and the two of them sat down quietly on the sofa in his office.

When she finally was able to speak, she let it all spill out. How she was the first member of her family ever to go to college. How she had studied music and music pedagogy. How she emerged with a degree and the talent to be a professional music teacher.

And how, when it came time to seek a job, she had collapsed in the face of fear, intimidated that “someone like me” could ever take her proper place in the world of educated and sophisticated people who taught music and comprised the esteemed musical culture of Pittsburgh. After graduation, she never applied for a single job in music.

She settled for a different keyboard instead. One with letters and numbers on it, instead of ebony and ivory. One that produced inane correspondence and gobbledygook reports instead of glorious music. And she hated every minute of it.

And herself.

Two months later, Gloria was happily teaching music in Pittsburgh. The last time I heard, she still was.

For most of my working career, I have been an independent entrepreneur enjoying immensely each new venture and set of colleagues. But some years ago, after serious business reverses, I needed to recover financially. With no time and reserves to start another new business myself, I looked for employment in a big company. And, in due course I found myself in a lucrative job I hated. I was no better at my new work than Gloria was at being a secretary, but I was better at covering up my inadequacies and repositioning myself within the company often enough to avoid being targeted for firing. As my stock options and other financial inducements to remain in the company grew, so did my willingness to remain in a job I hated. Given my fear of financial insecurity, I would have stayed there until retirement age, I am sad to say. But fortunately, new management arrived and restructured the company.

One of their first moves was to eliminate my whole division and fire me.

I got the word at 10:30AM. By noon, I had wrapped up all my affairs there, delegating to others my various works-in-progress and packing up my few personal belongings. I headed home for lunch with Patti.

The next morning, as I stood at our kitchen counter pouring our morning coffee, I began to feel funny. There was a kind of buzzing, vibrating feeling somewhere in my body. In my feet, first. But it was creeping up on the rest of me. Like a warm carbonating shiver. I figured it had to be a heart attack in the offing.

I put down the coffee pot so I wouldn’t scald myself when it hit. I stood there at the counter and felt the gentle tingle ease its way up my legs, into my torso, and keep on coming. The progression crept up my body for fifteen or twenty seconds before it flooded my head with an effervescence that suddenly burst out of me in a loud crescendo voice that startled and thrilled me: “Thank you, God! Oh, thank you, God!” I heard myself shouting. I quivered all over with deep relief, repeating it over and over again. Thank you, God! Thank you for inflicting freedom on me, freedom I had lost the courage to claim for myself.

In the years between my firing Gloria and God’s getting me fired from my hateful job, I had occasion to fire other people whose performance could not be made satisfactory. But despite my unpromising initial experience with Gloria, I engaged in those conversations almost eagerly. I always knew that the person I was going to fire had known long before I did that they were not in the right job for them. They had been living for months or years in some kind of hell they from which they could not release themselves. A hell of fearing they’d be found out. A hell of self-loathing for failing to pursue a dream. A hell of stressful striving to produce what was beyond their capacity.

I am not so insensitive or heartless as to imagine that all firings are wonderful or have magnificent consequences, but I do know that they can.

MY BROTHER LORRIE

So, if you grow up in a household where Jewish-or-not is simply a moot point, you don’t become very skilled at identifying who is or is not Jewish. That’s how I got clear to college without its ever occurring to me which of my classmates happened to be Jewish, with the sole exception of Rochelle Greenberg whose father I knew to be the local Rabbi. But as for a bunch of others whose names I now know were sure giveaways to their Jewishness, I was mentally inert.

One of my dearest buddies in high school was named Loren Schoenburg. That he was Jewish might be the first thing that would come to some people’s mind, but not mine. Of course I wasn’t unaware that his family didn’t worship at the standard-brand churches in town—but then, they didn’t worship anywhere else, either, so what did it matter anyhow? I guess I knew at some dim level that Lorrie was Jewish, but it was a meaningless designation. Lorrie and Eliot were simply fast friends, doing together all the dangerous and demented things that teenagers do.

We parted company right after graduation from high school, with Lorrie headed off for a stint in the Air Force where he would spend a couple of years firing off letters bitterly despising the sub-zero climate at a God-forsaken base in the Aleutian Islands, while I headed off to the local state college.

Fresno State College was a small school in an overgrown cow-town turning out farmers and teachers, for the most part. When I arrived there in 1954, the student body was liberally sown with veterans returning from the Korean War, guys in their early twenties who had experienced life’s harshest realities in Asian battlefields and brothels that were utterly beyond the imagining of those of us who stayed home. When they came back, they brought with them all their hard-living habits, yen for risk, and sexual aggressiveness, and they tended to run with each other—a natural fraternity whose overseas initiation had been brutal and intense.

But they also yearned for some of the traditional home life they’d missed, and so some of them joined the formal “Greek” fraternities at Fresno State. Many joined one in particular, Kappa Sigma. And since hardened vets couldn’t easily regress to the more innocent role of “frat boy” that prevailed among the membership of the other fraternities, Kappa Sigma took on a renegade personality of its own—raucous, rowdy, rambunctious, worldly, unconventional, destructive, lawless.

Which is why it appealed to me and why I joined Kappa Sigma myself.

And that’s why, when Lorrie was discharged from the Air Force several years later and enrolled at Fresno State, Kappa Sigma appealed to him, too. So when “rushing” for new pledges began in the fall, I made sure that Lorrie was well showcased at Kappa Sigma and that the “brothers” got to know him for the great guy I knew he was. All went as planned, and when the end of “rush season” arrived several weeks later and it was time for fraternities to issue invitations, it was a foregone conclusion that Kappa Sigma would extend a membership invitation to Lorrie.

Or so I thought.

“Uh, there’s a bit of a problem,” began the adult alumni advisor to our fraternity, a very proper local insurance executive who had invited me to his office to discuss “a very important matter”. He looked across his big desk at me with a well-practiced mixture of empathy and sadness. “I know you’re the principal sponsor of Lorrie and that the brothers all agree he is a fine person, but I’m afraid I have to inform you that he is not eligible to become a member of Kappa Sigma.”

“Why is that? What are you talking about?” I groped, dumbfounded.

“Well, you see, in the national charter of Kappa Sigma fraternity, there’s a clause.”

“What kind of clause?” I responded, feeling some vague stirring of suspicion and anger melding in me.

He tapped the red leather-bound volume that lay on his desk—the national constitution and by-laws of the fraternity. Then his index finger crawled to the top of the book, slid down a bookmark, and peeled it open to the page that would dismiss Lorrie.

“It says right here—let me show you,” he spun the book around, “Here in the opening sentence it says that ‘Kappa Sigma is a fraternal organization for the mutual pleasure and benefit of white Christian college men’. I’m afraid that doesn’t include your Mr. Schoenburg.”

I looked at him perplexedly, so he spelled it out. “He is clearly not a Christian. So the fraternity may not invite him to join.”

“So, to hell with the charter. That’s ridiculous. It makes no sense at all to keep a guy like Lorrie out of the fraternity. Everybody wants him.” My brain began roiling like hot lava, my vision going blurry. “Hey, this is the stupidest damned thing I’ve ever heard of!”

“Well,” he continued ever so reasonably, “we certainly can’t violate the charter of our national organization, now, can we? I mean, that would bring about de-certification of our local chapter and our expulsion from the national body. It would mean death for our brotherhood here. Now you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“But what the hell is the point of having the chapter here if it doesn’t include the people we want it to include?”

“Well,” he smoothed along, “you’ll come to see as you grow over the years that sometimes one simply has to abide by the rules as we receive them, and that it is not ours to question the wisdom of those who made them.”

I stumbled from his office blindly—furious, frustrated, helpless. This supercilious son-of-a-bitch was going to undo Lorrie’s and my years of indivisibility with one smug citation of a line in a charter I was certain no undergraduate ever even knew existed. Well, the hell with that. I’ll just quit the God-damned fraternity. I don’t want to be part of any organization that has that kind of prejudice enshrined in its charter anyhow.

I went home and flung myself on my bed, stewing and fuming and swearing. I wore myself out with anger and finally fell asleep, probably to avoid calling Lorrie with the news.

But somewhere in the middle of the night, my mind lit up ablaze and I sat bolt upright in bed. The words of the alumni advisor shimmered before me: One simply has to abide by the rules as we receive them, and it is not ours to question the wisdom of those who made them.

Hot damn! Two can play that game!

Among all the hocus-pocus of fraternity life is the ritual of “blackballing”. At the end of rush season, a list of prospective members—pledges, they’re called—is drawn up and the members gather in the fraternity house parlor to vote secretly on whom to invite. As each prospective invitee’s name is announced, a wooden box and a velvet sack are passed from member to member. Each in turn reaches into the velvet sack, selects and removes either a small white wooden cube or a round black ball, and, palming it to conceal his choice, surreptitiously deposits it in the box. When all members have finished voting on that individual, the box is opened. If there is no black ball in the box, the invitation is approved. If even one black ball is in the box among the white cubes, the invitation is dead. The person in question can never be invited into Kappa Sigma fraternity. And no challenge can ever be made to undo the blackballing.

By late morning I was back in the office of our alumni advisor.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me about following the rules,” I said, “and so I wanted to let you know I have decided to do just that.”

“Oh, good,” he responded, no doubt thinking: Smart boy. Learns his lessons well.

“Yes, you see, I still have three years to go at Fresno State, and here’s what I intend to do. Every time a new member is proposed, I will blackball him.”

Confusion rippled across his face. He looked away briefly to compose a thought, struggled with it, and returned his gaze uneasily to me.

“Right. You get it,” I continued. “Three years. No new pledges. I’ll blackball every single one. Come 1958 the house will be empty. Adios to Kappa Sigma at Fresno State.”

I savored his look of incredulity for a moment and then finished. “You said the national office would kill us off if we take Lorrie in. I’m telling you that I’ll kill us off if we don’t.”

Later that day he called to say he had decided that Lorrie was “Christian in spirit” and that was plenty good enough for him.

REVOLUTIONARY FEVER

Polite dinner guests that they were, they listened patiently as I blithered on about my grand schemes for correcting everything that was wrong with the world. Fresh in town to be the associate minister for “Social Action” programs at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, I was full of myself and raring to go. Here it was, 1967, and the world was in astonishing turmoil…from flower children in Haight-Ashbury to flaming cities in Newark and Cleveland, from assassinations of beloved leaders to free love and marijuana.

He was an earnest young professor of politics at Princeton University, and she was a post-doctoral fellow at Educational Testing Service studying the role of non-verbal communications in political dialogue. Stalwart members of the church, they were bright and knowledgeable and well-grounded professionals, in evident contrast to my rambunctious head full of enthusiasm and ideals.

When I wound down, he looked across the table at me and soberly pronounced his verdict. “Eliot, I have to tell you that in my professional judgment, the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, is a piss-poor place to begin a revolution.”

I howled in appreciation of his discerning view of both my hoary aspirations and the congregation’s pure Eastern Establishment culture. The membership of 1,800 was chock-a-block full of Fortune 500 CEO’s, grey-haired professors from Princeton University and the Institute of Advanced Study (Einstein’s place of work) and Princeton Theological Seminary, and assorted other leaders from every imaginable field of endeavour (not to mention those who lived very comfortably on inheritances flowing from previous generations’ prosperity). Few of them were likely to have a whole lot of enthusiasm for upsetting the well-ordered world that was so conspicuously rewarding their lifelong aspirations and accomplishments and trust funds.

But I was to learn over time that beneath the apparently predictable façade of this congregation of 1,800 individuals beat many a heart of passion for innovation and justice and holiness in the everyday encounters of humankind. In due course, I found myself warmly supported in my various initiatives by a wide range of members. One, an architect/contractor, clambered about a burned-out building I had found in Trenton to see if it might serve as a much-needed day-care center in a desperately poor neighborhood. Another, a taciturn musicologist and philanthropist, soon afterward offered the funds necessary to rebuild the building as a facility for children. Others joined with bemused enthusiasm in a massive overhaul of the church-school program, installing paid teachers and requiring all parents to serve as co-teachers on a rotating basis. More support came for the coffee house and the street ministry and the outreach to the university students and the dozen or more adult-education courses and the seminars on TV’s impact on child development. It was the Sixties, and almost anything I could dream up, somebody would get behind it. And when I went too far, the senior minister—a man of great patience and respect—would assure the pillars of the church that he still maintained a steady hand on the wheel and would ensure that wild-eyed Eliot would not do anything irreparably damaging or heretical. He gave me far more running room than I deserved, and I loved him for it.

It got a little heady, after a while. So many ideas, so many resources to work with, so much going on in the church, the community, and the Sixties world at large. I needed some grounding, and I got it in regular installments from Krista.

Krista was a fifty-something local photographer well respected for her Dorothea Lange-like studies of America’s overlooked—the Native Americans sequestered on squalid “reservations”, the urban families living from food-stamp to food-stamp, the bored and lost individuals who hid out all day in suburban family rooms with a TV and a headache for company. She had a no-bullshit view of the world and the people in it. And she was no respecter of status, station, pretension, or tradition.

Well, actually there was one tradition she found it impossible to wrest herself away from. She still adhered to the faith of her growing up, deeply inculcated during her childhood in Scandinavia. She herself found it an amusing anomaly, her inability to let a Sunday go by without dutifully paying a visit to a church down the street from mine for worship and desultory conversation over coffee with a bunch of people she didn’t have much affection for. The custom was all the more curious, given Krista’s totally unconventional habits of mind and lifestyle, since the pastor of the church was legendary for his narrowness of mind and slavish devotion to ritual and routine. He abhorred everything about the Sixties and deeply wished we could have done with all this new thinking and lascivious behaviour. He was the last person on earth I’d have expected Krista to accept as a spiritual leader. But he conducted the rituals of her lifelong religion with dignity and that was enough for her.

Well, every couple of months I’d ask Krista to have lunch with me on Sunday after worship, and we’d rendezvous at a local coffee shop for conversation and commiseration about the unmet needs of the world. I felt that I needed these regular doses of her brutal honesty and bitter determination to heal the world, to keep me from slipping into chronic envy and eventual emulation of the thinking and lifestyle of wealthy Princetonians—a transformation that would come all too easily to me. Preternaturally dour, Krista would customarily spend much time lamenting the inadequate depth and sincerity of my and her congregations’ commitment to social justice, despairing of finding any hope for larger society, and challenging me about the legitimacy of my work. I welcomed her counterpoint to my own perpetually glowing appraisal of whatever I was involved with, including myself.

So why was she so sunny and light-hearted this particular Sunday, I wondered. Some barely suppressed delight was working in her throughout our lunch, and finally I had to ask her what was going on with her.

She squirmed for just a second, made an instant decision not to start dissembling at this late date in our relationship, and let me in on her reverie.

“Down at our church, we have this custom where different members of the congregation provide the flower arrangements for the altar every Sunday. Well, today was my turn to provide them, and I decided to do an arrangement with lots of greenery,” she said.

That didn’t seem like grounds for uncommon delight, but she kept going.

“You know our pastor. Everything he does, he does by the book. Well, he follows the same routine every Sunday afternoon. After worship, he has lunch at his desk at the church. And then he looks at the list of shut-ins, counts them up. Then, he goes back into the sanctuary to get the flowers from the altar, takes them into the kitchen at the church, and breaks them into little bunches, one for each shut-in. Ties them up and then carries the lot out into his car. Then he spends the afternoon driving around dropping off these little bouquets to all the shut-ins.”

Yes, and…?

“So, while you and I are enjoying lunch together, Pastor Frank is touring Princeton bestowing on his beloved shut-ins hand-tied sprays of my finest home-grown marijuana.”

People want to help you.

MENTORS MATTER

“Oh, goody!” Leland enthused. “Anything this complicated, there’s got to be a dozen ways to beat it!”

He was thumbing through the two-inch thick stack of policies, rules, and regulations governing PBS’ programming, including how underwriting credits would be governed.

His confident glee flushed me with relief. I had a lot riding on this.

Some days before, I had brought home the bacon. After many months of effort, I had succeeded in persuading Johnson & Johnson to become a million-dollar underwriter of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. We were all thrilled. J&J’s money would assure that we had ample funds to produce the new seasons’ programs. For their part, J&J was eager to reap the goodwill that would come from having their name aired as a major supporter. A perfect symbiotic partnership. So far, so good.

Until I ran into the PBS bureaucracy.

I had assured J&J that their name would be part of the audio credits spoken at the beginning and end of the program, and that their logo would appear during the voice-over credits. Turns out I spoke too soon.

Sorry, said the powers-that-be at PBS. We have a strictly limited set of fonts that can be used to name the underwriters of our programs. (In recent years, PBS underwriters’ credits are all but indistinguishable from full-blown commercials, but in the early days of public television people were at great pains to be “non-commercial”. Hence the three authorized typefaces.) Pick one of these, they said. Nothing else will be acceptable.

And, of course, the PBS stance was not acceptable to J&J, who saw immediately that none of the approved fonts were anything like their famous red script logo. The adamant PBS position was pushing them to the verge of considering other ways they could use the million dollars instead of giving it to us. Which put me on the verge of panic.

“This should be fun,” Leland continued. “Hmm, let’s see what we have here.” He wetted his plump thumb at his lips and began deliberately peeling through the pages. He gave short shrift to the section on PBS’ approved fonts for underwriting credits. He already knew what that said. He was looking for something else, anything else, that would confound the offending policy.

I sat quietly watching him, knowing I was observing a master at work. Here was a man who was a monumental figure in the city of Pittsburgh—an esteemed lawyer who had been Corporate Counsel at PPG Industries and a leader of practically everything important that happened in that city for three decades—who was now working once again as my mentor, showing me how to make things happen against all odds.

My mentor. Leland was my mentor. That is a simple statement, but it means the world to me. Here’s why.

Noted psychiatrist George Valliant has conducted a longitudinal study of individuals who graduated from Harvard, contacting them repeatedly over many decades to assess how satisfied they were with the unfolding of their lives. He discovered a watershed phenomenon: most adults who could identify someone who had served as a mentor to them early in their career were largely well satisfied with what they had achieved. Among those without a mentor, few were satisfied. The contrast was stark and startling. Mentors made all the difference between fulfilling your hopes and not.

Leland was well into his 70s when he took an interest in me and began to impart to me what he had learned in his career. Many decades later, I frequently hear myself quoting him to others—and even more often hear his pearls of wisdom whispered inside my head. It is not too much to say that he is the source of almost all of whatever savoire faire I possess.

I got Leland as a fringe benefit of my tenure at “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. He was a director of Small World Enterprises, Inc., when I became its president. While I am prone to hyperbole generally and especially when it comes to Leland, it is not too much to describe the man as a titan. His half-page obituary in the New York Times certainly would subtantiate that description, acknowledging his extraordinary influence in shaping modern-day Pittsburgh. He used his stature as a senior peer of the realm in the powerful, tight-knit business community there to persuade others to liberate their city from its hideous pollution, deep-seated racism, and parochial views.

His legendary legal career, including winning landmark cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, almost paled beside his other roles and achievements—visionary leader of the Pittsburgh “Renaissance” after World War II when the city transformed itself from a gritty oversized steel mill to a beautiful city and leading cultural center, author of notable books and articles in prestigious journals, pioneer of efficient urban transportation systems, art conoisseur and patron, civil rights champion, philosopher, advisor to foreign governments, and founding Chairman of the Board of KQED, the nation’s first public television station. (His concern for children’s programming preceded his involvement in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. Upon the founding of KQED in 1954, he remarked, “On this station you will find a children’s hour designed to determine whether it is necessary for someone to get killed in order to entertain young folks.”)

Now well into his 70s, he was deeply involved on a daily basis in our work at Small World Enterprises, Inc., and our sister company, Family Communications, Inc., the non-profit organization we had created to receive the contributions needed produce the television programs. He spent ten or fifteen hours a week in our offices or traveling with me to important meetings, shepherding me away from foolishness and toward smarter ways of doing things. Today, he was showing me how to beat a bureaucratic system.

“Got it!”, he crowed as he rubbed his palms against each other.

I looked over as he glided his soft fingers across the paragraph in the middle of a page, re-reading and confirming his find.

“Yes, this should do it,” he concluded with a satisfied grin.

I leaned closer and saw that the document he was reading wasn’t the PBS policies and rules and regulations at all. It was the FCC regulations, the section pertaining to public television.

“Right here,” he pointed. “Listen to this.” He read from the FCC pages:

“Sponsorship Identification. Sponsorship identification or disclosure must accompany any material that is broadcast in exchange for money, service, or anything else of value paid to a station, either directly or indirectly. This announcement must clearly say that the time was purchased and by whom. In the case of advertisements for commercial products or services, it is sufficient to announce the sponsor’s corporate or trade name, or the name of the sponsor’s product (where it is clear that the mention of the product constitutes a sponsorship identification).”

“See?” he went on. “Listen: ‘disclosure must accompany any material that is broadcast’. That means it’s illegal for a program to go on the air unless it discloses who is putting up the money!”

“But how does that help us?” I asked. “That’s what we already want to do—say it’s J&J that’s putting up the money. But J&J doesn’t want to use anything but their logo, not the one of the three fonts PBS insists on.”

“Ah, my boy…” he intoned. Whenever Leland said Ah, my boy, I knew an important lesson was to follow.

“That’s just the point. Look at that Johnson & Johnson logo. Everyone in the world knows that company—that logo—right?”

I nodded.

“Over the years, they have spent millions in advertising and PR to expose people to that logo. And they have succeeded brilliantly. They have established it as an indelible image in everone’s mind.”

So?

“So, that logo has become their legal signature.”

I got it.

He drove on: “Any other visual representation of the words ‘Johnson & Johnson’ would be a misrepresentation—a forgery—that might mislead a viewer as to the true nature of the underwriter. And that would violate the FCC requirements.”

I knew enough to know that FCC requirements would always trump PBS policy.

“So that’s it,” he wrapped up. “Just tell PBS that the use of any typeface or font other than a perfect replica of the Johnson & Johnson logo will put them in violation of this FCC regulation. I think that should do it.”

And it did.

DISTANCING

Some of my best friends are physicians. I like them. Actually, I really love some of them. Smart, decent, caring, silly, funny, athletic, generous, thoughtful, imaginative, adventurous, humble.

In private.

But as a professional category of people, doctors are—how to put this diplomatically?—often observed not to exhibit all that many of those traits as they go about their work. Well, smart, to be sure. And probably caring, although even that is up for grabs among some of the greediest of the breed. Cold, God-like, arrogant, conceited, judgmental, distant—these are the adjectives that come to the minds of many.

And that included me, for a while. As a teenager and collegian, I had some encounters with doctors—my own and my parents’—that left me contemptuous of their humanity (or lack thereof). One that comes to mind is the physician who responded to my plea for help with my junior-high-age obesity by calling me a “pig” and putting me on amphetemines that had me caroming off the walls with excess energy one day and blackly wondering why to go on living the next. Most people can supply their own illustrations of physician insensitivity, and that’s not the point of this piece. Suffice it to say that my sense of superiority over the heartlessness of doctors was well entrenched by my mid-20s.

And the point is how I came to soften my judgmental stance, to have some grudging understanding of why some physicians choose to distance themselves from patients, often in clumsy ways but—after my experience at Mission Emergency Hospital—ways that are no long mysterious in their origin.

I owe it to Gil. In many ways Gil personified the private/professional dichotomy of physicians. When we first encountered each other, he and his wife were in their early 30s living in the charming village of Solvang, tucked into a mountain valley above Santa Barbara. Patti and I had moved to Solvang just months after marrying in our early 20s and fell into friendship with Gil and his wife almost immediately. They were fellow members of the church we attended, Gil and I played tennis together, we potlucked dinners together, took a holiday together—and Gil became my personal physician. In private he displayed all the wonderful qualities I said doctors of my acquaintance possess, yet at the office he was all business. It was almost as if we didn’t know each other, let alone were close friends. I found his distancing himself from me mystifying at the time, but accepted it as the lesser part of our relationship.

Then, coincidentally, Gil and his family moved to San Francisco at the same time Patti and I moved to Marin County just across the bay—Gil to enter a surgical residency program and me to attend theological seminary. We saw little of each other that first year, owing to the intensity of our study programs and the lack of easy proximity we had enjoyed in tiny Solvang.

“Eliot,”, the caller said, “it’s Gil.” What a delight to hear that wonderful sonorous voice, instantly recalling such warm times together. “I’ve been thinking about you over there in that ivory tower lost in great thoughts about God and the hereafter and such. So I decided to offer you a short course in getting re-grounded into the real world.”

“I’m game,” I replied. “What do you have in mind?”

One of my other Solvang buddies had apparently had the same concern about what might become of his earthy friend Eliot by the time he’d been bathed in theology for three years, so he sent me a subsciption to Playboy to offset what he imagined would be the pious claptrap I’d be absorbing in seminary. I figured Gil probably had something different in mind.

But Gil’s overture, coupled with John’s Playboy therapy, reminded me that just as I harbored some pretty vivid stereotypes of physicians, others entertain the same image of ministers. Before I had made it known to our friends in Solvang that we’d be moving away so I could attend seminary, we went to a wonderfully raucous New Year’s Eve party with all the gang we ran around with. Somewhere in the midst of the evening’s revelry, the host sent a shudder through the party. Referring to the minister of the church most of us attended, he yelled in mock horror, “Can you imagine what a disaster this party would be if Ron were here?!”

Patti and I exchanged a look that said, “Take note. This is what we can expect from here on out, once they know where we’re headed.”

What Gil had in mind was that I come join him on a Saturday night as he spent twelve hours on duty in the Emergency Room of the Mission-district hospital in San Francisco where he was being trained that month. “You’ll get to see a side of life you probably don’t get much of over there in San Anselmo,” he correctly predicted.

The Mission district in 1962 exerted a magnetic attraction for the most unfortunate human beings in San Francisco. Shabby, smelly homeless street people slumping in doorways. Hollowed-out alcoholics aching for a slug of cheap wine, trying to cadge a quarter. Losers of slugfests in noisy bars, staggering down the sidewalk with bloody noses and feeling with their tongue the slick open spot on a gum where a tooth used to be moments ago. Splotchy women hoping that some guy’s lust will override his revulsion at the cheesy tight shorts’ squeezing ripples of cellulite down the back of her meaty thigh.

On a Saturday night, faithfully as churchgoers, they assemble as the congregation of the Emergency Room. They crowd into the narthex—a shabby concrete-block hallway painted institutional tan—just inside the ER doorway and clamor for attention from the white-coated priests. They are co-mingled with others there by accident—those driving through the area or on the nearby freeways when a collision requires medical care at the nearest hospital. The massed penitents move aside grudgingly when a sprinting team of EMTs plows a furrow through them with a gurney bearing someone minutes from death.

Gil met me out front, both of us in our street clothes. We moved through the crowded hallway unnoticed and entered the doctors’ dressing room. Gil opened his locker and slipped into a white coat with his name badge on it. He then turned to me with another one and said, “Here, put this on.” I did, and it changed everything.

We emerged from the doorway we had entered unnoticed minutes before, and immediately the whole mass of damaged humanity that had been clogging the hallway like torpid sludge turned fluid and splashy, suddenly surging toward us with frantic speed, waving arms, piercing voices. “Doctor!” “Doctor, over here!” “Hey, Doc! Look at this!” “Doc, you gotta help me!” “Doctor!!”

They were upon us, yanking on our sleeves, pulling at our coat tails, spinning us around with an impolite yank on the shoulder, jumping to be seen between others’ shoulders. In seconds, Gil and I had been separated from each other, buffeted apart by clamoring voices and hands. He caught my eye and waved me toward a glass-enclosed room just down the hall, and we shoved our way into its sanctuary, closing the door behind us to clip off the trail of pestering beggars.

“Welcome to my world,” Gil said ruefully.

Thanks to the popularity of ER-based television programs, I needn’t elaborate on the scene. Over the course of twelve interminable hours, I saw shredded flesh and broken bones, the result of knife blade or bullet or fist or windshield. I saw the DTs shivver a withered body into a fist-tight fetal scrunch. I saw the cunning feign illness in hopes of securing a clean bed and a hot meal for one night. I saw the dying die.

Every time I emerged from an enclosed treatment room and exposed myself to the desperate supplicants clamoring for the attention of someone in a white coat, I wanted to run past them and flee out the door, flinging the coat behind me. Not just because I was only apparently a doctor and could not actually help them. Not because they were revolting to me, although many were. Not because I was afraid.

But because I didn’t want to get involved with them.

And that is how I came to understand why some doctors, some of the time, distance themselves from patients. I knew that if I had been a real doctor in that ER that night, I would have looked at the next patient and thought, “I don’t want to know your name, I don’t want to know where you came from or where you are going, and I don’t want to know anything about any problem you have that doesn’t consist of flesh and bone. I have certain skills that I can apply to the repair of your damaged anatomy, but I do not have time or heart enough to fix your life. There, this bandage will stem the bleeding, and this cast will set the bone and this pill will reduce the pain. Now get out of my sight before I begin to care about you. I have other work to do.”

As I drove across the Golden Gate bridge the next morning, headed for the serenity of my seminary distant on a wooded hillside in Marin County, far from Gil and his medical texts and his Mission-district human debris, a line from one of my own basic textbooks came to mind: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” (Matthew 7:1)

CATCH AND RELEASE

“Dad”, he whispered ferociously, “when are we going to start fishing?” My ten-year old son Jad was on the edge of frantic, wondering if Hoagy would ever give us the go-ahead.

“Just remember what I told you when you first got interested in this,” I whispered back, “there is a difference between going fishing and catching fish. This is the ‘going fishing’ part.”

My calm reasoning belied my own growing curiosity and bewilderment about what the hell we actually were accomplishing here on the banks of Beaverkill Creek, where my friend Hoagy—a master fly fisherman and rod-maker, the Stradivarius of split-bamboo fly rod builders—had led us on a warm June evening. For the last thirty or forty minutes we had watched Hoagy do…well, do nothing. Or so it seemed.

We had parked the car and followed Hoagy through the leafy woods along the edge of the creek, up to this spot where he put down his gear and told us to just stand by while he studied the situation. That had been a long, long time ago. Endless minutes crawled by while Hoagy variously stood quietly with his arms folded, let his gaze meander over the water and foliage, smoked his pipe, squatted Indian-style and gazed some more, reached out for a leaf and studied the underside of it, stood some more, smoked some more, squatted some more, studied another leaf or two…until Jad was about to scream.

He snatched at my sleeve and cocked his head toward Hoagy. “Dad,” he pleaded in an anguished whisper, “Do something! It’s going to get dark! What’s he going to do—just wait until it’s too late?”

Patience has never been Jad’s long suit. Everything within him drives forward passionately, flinging him totally into whatever he commits himself to—no doubt a necessary quality for someone who later became an elite-level “endurance athlete” competing in Ironman Triathlons, duathlons, marathons, and other multi-hour races around the world. When he became intrigued by fishing at age seven, he poured all his meager finances into subscriptions for fishing magazines and was soon earning extra money to purchase “blanks”—plain, unfinished dowels of fiberglass—for making his own rods.

Opening day of trout season had become a treasured father-son ritual, and we went out fishing as often as my schedule would permit—never often enough for him. In due course I had called Hoagy, a friend and former colleague who was now a fulltime guide and rod-maker, to see if we could arrange a day of fishing with him. Wise man that he is, he suggested that we wait a couple of years until Jad’s casting technique was better developed (and, no doubt, until his capacity to absorb the master’s lessons was more mature.) A perfectly reasonable stipulation from a man who guides clients to fly-fishing nirvana on continents all around the globe—but an eternity for a now-ten year old who waited two years to get to the Beaverkill with Hoagy and now, it appears, will wait here another two years before wetting a line.

But even then we weren’t done waiting. It was another fifteen minutes before Hoagy rose from his haunches at the edge of the creek and eased quietly back to where we stood waiting under the overhanging branches of the woods. He went over to his tackle box and removed a battered leather case that held some flies. He leafed through the pages until his fingers plucked out a speck of white fuzz no bigger than the head of a match. At first I thought he was simply removing some foreign matter that had fallen into his case—a bit of dandelion fluff, perhaps.

“Okay, Jad,” he said softly, “you know how to bend on a fly, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, this is your lure then.” He proffered the speck of fuzz. “You see, the hatch is about to begin, and this will look to the trout just like the insects that are beginning to come out from under these leaves. And many of those insects will head down to the surface of the creek, and when they do—boom! The trout will begin their feast. Except that the trout that gets yours will get a surprise, instead.”

Jad set about bending the fly onto his leader while Hoagy handed me a similar lure to put on my line. He checked Jad’s knot, complimented him on it, and led us silently to the edge of the Beaverkill. He stoked his pipe once more and beckoned Jad to his side so he could speak sotto voce.

“See that tree on the bank over there with the three big exposed roots that curl into the water over the edge?” Hoagy motioned to the far side of the creek, about forty feet away. Jad nodded. “Your fish is just in front of the middle root, the one that humps farthest out. See the one I mean?” Jad nodded again.

“So, here’s what you do,” Hoagy went on in a conspiratorial tone. “You drop your fly about two or three feet upstream of that root, about six feet this side of the bank, and let it drift down to him. Then be ready to set the hook when he takes it.”

Hours of practice casting in our front yard had made Jad a keen shot with a fly, able to consistently drop one onto a garbage can lid on the lawn at forty feet—but that had been without the complications of overhanging branches and the pressure of performing in front of a world-class maestro of the fly rod. But Jad sized up the situation, calculated his backcast to avoid tree branches, waved a couple of lazy arcs with the line to get into the rhythm, and then let it fly.

The weightless white fuzz traced a perfect ellipse through the evening air to settle silently onto the surface of the Beaverkill right where Hoagy pointed.

For one long second, nothing. Then, in a single instant, a bulge and ripple of the water, a silvery flash of wet skin, a snap of a jaws, a twist of head. Jad instinctively flipped the rod up to set the hook, and suddenly it was “Fish on!”

Several minutes later, Jad was proudly examining a hefty sixteen-inch Rainbow trout that splashed frantically in the net until Hoagy gently but firmly grasped him, removed the hook from its upper jaw, and released him to return to his home by the middle root of the tree across the Beaverkill.

“Okay, Eliot, let me show you where your fish is,” Hoagy said quietly. Within minutes, “my fish” was also netted and released. He pointed out another spot for Jad to hit, and he did, and landed his next fish. Then it was my turn. And so it went, for an extraordinary hour until darkness closed in around us and we groped our way back through the woods to the car.

On the drive home, Jad and I savored the lessons of the day—admiring Hoagy’s knowledge of trout and understanding of the hatch that equipped him to analyze the situation, marveling at the patience he used in sizing it up, musing over the new-found awareness that trout don’t aimlessly swim up and down a stream but, rather, take up a homestead someplace, like next to a tree root, and live there forever.

So, now I know how to do it right. But, ironically, I don’t fish any more. Somewhere along the line, as I gradually found myself repulsed by the “sport” of hunting (despite having grown up shooting birds and squirrels and jackrabbits), I asked myself whether fishing was any better. And paradoxically, the answer I came to was that catch-and-release fishing was perhaps even less humane than shoot-and-eat hunting or catch-and-eat fishing. At least those acts were sort of in keeping with the natural food-chain.

By contrast, catch-and-release fishing began to feel like taunt-and-injure, seduce-and-damage—the monumentally unfair abuse of fellow creatures. I began to imagine how I’d feel if someone put a meal in front of me when I was hungry, and then when I put the first bite in my mouth found myself impaled through the jaw with a steel hook and jerked off my chair, dragged around the dining room while I writhed in fear and pain, and toyed with until whoever hooked me got tired of the “sport” and decided to let me go.

So I’m glad that Jad and I had our time with Hoagy (whose continuing enjoyment of fishing I do not presume to judge in any way), and I’m grateful to him for the lessons he taught us that fine day on the Beaverkill. We’ll just be applying them to other pursuits.

Timing may not be everything, but it’s close.

LUCK OF THE DRAW

Ken had always known that he wanted to dedicate his life to doing good. During his teens and college years, the images of doing good that played in his head centered around underdeveloped nations—maybe helping them find ways to create prosperity and full employment. So he settled on becoming an international financier.

Smart guy that he was, Ken studied the various top-drawer banking and brokerage houses not to determine which offered the best jobs and opportunities for advancement, but to determine who had the best training program. He figured that once he was well trained, he’d find his own ways to move up and around. And at the time, in the mid-80s, E. F. Hutton ran the best training program in the business. So Ken knocked on their door. Repeatedly.

E. F. Hutton was not interested in Ken, a newly graduated religious studies major from Brown University. They were looking for trainees who had demonstrated more conspicuous affection for the world of business. But they did not reckon on Ken’s monumental persistence, and after more than a year of saying “No” to him repeatedly, they finally said, “Well, maybe.” Perhaps, they reckoned, his determination is a quality that could offset his lack of prior education in the field.

Ken passed through the entry-level portals and began hopping the hurdles toward being hired. He survived several rounds of interviews with the HR folks and then with mid-level managers. They kicked his tires, pronounced him roadworthy, and sent him forth to meet the Big Boss who would have the final say-so about hiring him.

The Big Boss who ran E. F. Hutton’s operations in the northeast was based in Boston, and he agreed to meet with Ken one Monday afternoon at 4PM, just after the stock markets closed. So on the morning of October 19, 1987, Ken donned his one suit, swept his new bride in tow, grabbed the sandwiches they had made for lunch, and clambered into their little yellow ’78 Toyota station wagon in Princeton, New Jersey, bound for Boston some six hours north.

He was nervous, of course. Who wouldn’t be? More than a year of all-out effort to breach the well-defended walls of E. F. Hutton was about to come to fruition—or not. More than a year of work, hope, fantasy, expectation, and fear. Of course he was nervous. So was his bride. But they had brought along their tranquilizer-of-choice—music. Both of them love music, and so they had loaded up a basketful of their favorite tapes. Slapping one after another into the slot in their tape player and cranking the volume to offset the whine of the overstressed little Toyota engine, they concocted a raucous rolling concert, hour after hour, all the way up Interstate 95 from New Jersey to Massachusetts. Van Morrison, Talking Heads, the Police, U2, Tracy Chapman, James Taylor, Clash, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan all entertained them while they whizzed along and munched their tuna sandwiches.

They found the E. F. Hutton building with no trouble, arriving just before 4PM. Ken parked, put on his one and only necktie, snugged it up, kissed his bride, and strode confidently forth, dandy new briefcase swinging beside him, into the hallowed halls where his future awaited. An elevator whisked him to the lush offices on the top floor overlooking Boston Harbor, where a secretary told Ken that the Big Boss would see him in just a few moments.

When the Big Boss swung open his office door to welcome Ken in, he didn’t look nearly as imposing or hearty as Ken had imagined. If anything, he seemed somehow diminished, although Ken had nothing but his imagined vision of Big Boss as a point of comparison. With a slow, tired sweep of the arm, the man waved Ken toward a cushy down sofa, then slumped defeatedly into an overstuffed chair nearby.

“Well,” he said with a deep sigh, “after a day like today, you still think you want to be in this business?”

With his most sprightly, cheery, optimistic, Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” attitude fully cranked up for the occasion, Ken responded like an puppy eager for adoption. “You bet!” he yelped, all but bounding up. “This is what I’ve been hoping for all my life!”

Some while later, the interview was over and Ken strode confidently back through the marble lobby, out the door to the street. He had nailed it. He was sure he had nailed it. The guy hadn’t said so exactly, but Ken knew he was going to hire him. No question. Hot damn! I nailed it. Where’s my wife? I’ve got to tell her! We’re on our way!

“Paper, mister?” squawked the scrawny newsboy standing beside a stack of fresh newspapers on the sidewalk. With both hands he held up a paper in front of him, like a banner.

“Huh? What?” Ken stuttered, momentarily knocked out of his exuberant reverie.

“Get your paper here, afternoon edition hot off the press. Read all about the big stock market crash today,” the kid said, shaking the paper up and down.

“What?!”

“Here you go,” the kid said as he pushed the paper into Ken’s hands.

Ken flipped it up so he could see the blaring headline: “WORST DAY ON WALL STREET IN HISTORY!”

Oh, shit. Oh, God. Oh, hell. Ken fumbled for some money to give the kid, then sagged back a step or two to scan the front page. The whole surface was paved with bold-faced alarms about today’s Big Crash, about Black Monday of 1987. The normally modulated language of proper Bostonian newspaper reporting disappeared under near-hysterical descriptions: “Dow-Jones Industrials Crushed!” “Investors Flee for their Lives!” “S&P 500 down 20%!” “S&P Futures down 29%!” “Trading halted in many stocks before the close!”

Oh, shit. Ken’s mind reeled with the implications. Or with confusion about what the implications really were. What did this mean? And, oh, shit, what about that interview I just had? Oh, no! Man, what did I do? Oh, shit. That’s why he looked so wiped out. And, oh, God, that’s what he meant when asked me if I still wanted to be in the business “after a day like today”.

Ken’s brain momentarily melted, then immediately regrouped. He looked around, searching for a pay phone. Remembering one in the lobby, he sprinted back inside and dialed my number.

“Eliot,” he blurted, “I’m in trouble.” He reeled off the story, telling me why and how he had come to be utterly unaware of the day’s calamitous events. “What shall I do? I just went through this entire interview and didn’t know a single thing about what had been happening all day. He never said anything about it, and we never discussed it at all. He must think I’m the biggest doofus that ever breathed. Should I go back upstairs and tell him that I didn’t know, that I’d been cooped up in the car all day and wasn’t listening to the radio? Oh, shit. What shall I do?”

“Don’t go back up there—not under any circumstances,” I advised. “Look at it this way. Either he thinks you are the most hopelessly ignorant cretin in the history of the world, somebody who didn’t care enough about the precious stock market to stay in touch with it every instant the way he and his ilk do, in which case there’s no way in hell he would hire you, or—and I’m suspecting this is the case—you have just re-defined for him the ideal of the person who is able to keep his head while all others around them are losing theirs, and he thinks you’re just the kind of guy they need around there. Either way, your going back up to him won’t change anything. Just hang in there and see what he says when he gets back to you.”

The Big Boss did get back to Ken, the very next day in fact. The good news was that Ken got the job.

The bad news? Ken got the job.

They sent him to New York City where he eagerly underwent the requisite weeks of the deservedly lauded training in the world and workings of finance, and then they fulfilled his dream of being assigned to the Portland, Maine, office of E. F. Hutton. He was on his way. All he had to do now was to build a clientele. How? Simple. Call a hundred or more unsuspecting citizens every day with an offer to be their stockbroker.

In the weeks after the worst single day in Wall Street history, the investors and would-be investors in the Portland, Maine, area codes were displaying with a vengeance the rectitude for which Mainers are famous. They were stuffing their money into coffee cans and mattresses, savoring the comeuppance that had struck down the know-it-alls in the world of high finance. Mistaking the rookie Ken for one of those know-it-alls, the people who didn’t hang up on him immediately took full advantage of the opportunity to castigate the handiest representative of Wall Street greed and overreaching, telling him a thing or two about prudence and humility.

No quitter, Ken hung in there trying to make a go of it, lasting eventually for nearly as long as he had persisted in getting E. F. Hutton to hire him in the first place. But telemarketing is a soul-searing job under the best of circumstances, and these were by any measure the very worst of circumstances. His one hundred and fifty “cold calls” a day, times 250 or so work days that first year, produced about 37,500 hang-up clicks and spontaneous harangues, but scarcely a handful of “keepers”. No clientele, no trades. No trades, no income. Stick a fork in it. This baby was done for—a non-starter from the git-go.

A year earlier, a year later, who knows…?

ICARUS FLIES AGAIN…WITH THE SAME RESULT

Bad timing is bad enough. Coupled with overreaching, it can be lethal.

The Greek myth of Icarus pretty well illustrates the lesson humanity has learned about overreaching. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, imprisoned together with his father in the Labyrinth from which escape seemed impossible. But Daedalus scrounged up some feathers and wax from which he fashioned wings for them, and they were able to fly up and over the Labyrinth and flee.

In his pre-flight instructions, Daedalus admonished his beloved son Icarus not to fly too high, lest the heat of the sun melt the wax and Icarus’ wings disintegrate. No doubt nodding in agreement at the time, once aloft young Icarus was quickly overcome with the thrill of flying and forgot—or ignored—his father’s warning. Higher and higher he soared until the fateful moment when his father proved sadly prescient—the wax softened, then turn liquid. The feathered wings flew apart, Icarus crashed into the sea, and he drowned.

‘Twas the seminal case of what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once laconically described as “irrational exuberance” when characterizing an overheated stock market where share prices had flown too high too fast.

I saw one of those up close.

Tim was a Naval Academy graduate who did a stint at Morgan Stanley as a hotshot young investment banker in the go-go years of the ‘90s. By the mid-90s it was clear that the internet was a once-in-a-lifetime cornucopia of opportunity, and he backed plenty of “e” businesses that made instant millionaires of their founders. The formula was pretty simple: come up with an “e” concept (anything.com), write a business plan, establish some rudimentary organization, maybe even find your first customer (optional), and then “go public” with an IPO (initial public offering) that eager and unthinking investors would snap up at ludicrous prices.

Tim was doing pretty well for himself at Morgan Stanley, taking home a million dollars or more in salary and bonuses every year, but after watching one too many of his investment banking clients walk away from an IPO with tens of millions—even hundreds of millions—that assured a lifetime of wealthy ease, he decided he wanted a piece of that action himself. So Tim accepted the role of CEO of a newly funded internet-based company. The concept was complex but sound, the target market seemingly ripe, and timing looked good.

I encountered him and his company about 1999, at the absolute height of the irrational exuberance surrounding dot-com companies. And Tim’s company was fully suffused with the dot-com management mania of the moment—securing sufficient technical workforce. With the hordes of new dot-com companies abjectly dependent on a relatively small pool of geeks who actually understood how the internet works and how to create programs and systems to manipulate it, the competition for talent was ferocious. Tim was hiring forty fresh techies every month. Some four hundred fifty new faces would crowd into the offices over the course of that year. That’s four hundred fifty into a company that had fewer than one hundred employees at the time. What was he going to do with all of them?

He wasn’t quite sure, but he was very sure that when he got it figured out, he’d be darned glad they were on his payroll and not somebody else’s. Tim was not going to get caught short on the one resource that was essential to success. One of his senior executives worried aloud at the rate they were spending money and warehousing technical talent for whom they had no immediate work.

“You let me worry about that,” Tim replied. “Just keep spending money. You can’t possibly spend it as fast as I can raise it.”

And he was right. Tim hauled in a hundred million here, a hundred million there. His fledgling company was all but drowning in the cash that irrationally exuberant investors dumped into the hands of the irrationally exuberant leaders of this enterprise that had yet to make its first sale to a real customer. In truth, his team really couldn’t spend it as fast as he could raise it.

The bigger problem was one of morale. Not the morale of the executive team that was already in place. The value—on paper—of their stock options was soaring with each new sack full of capital Tim dragged through the door, so they were living large, at least in their fantasy life. But the qualified talent being hired in droves from colleges and competitors had sort of hoped there’d be some interesting work for them to do once they arrived. Alas, the organization’s infrastructure and management system were insufficiently developed to slot them into stimulating and productive tasks on projects that would build the company and their resumes. Some collected paychecks for months of doing nothing, literally nothing, but sit at their work station and fiddle around with personal matters and aimlessly surf the internet to see what new wrinkles were emerging from other dot-com entrepreneurs.

Fun for a little while, but that gets old fast. They hung out aimlessly next to each other’s cubicles, like homeless vagrants on a street corner. They took to exchanging snide e-mails with each other, ridiculing their management. Conspiratorial conversations by the water cooler suddenly broke off when one of the executives rounded the corner. Some began taking on programming jobs on the QT, using Tim’s company’s computers to do moonlightiing work in broad daylight for personal clients, even for competitors. But mostly they just stewed. Soon this ever-growing bullpen of grumbling malcontents was giving off an ominous odor. Something clearly wasn’t working.

Just a few weeks later, Tim’s festering problem went away. Literally. The bubble of dot-com mania burst with a very loud bang in early 2000. Within a matter of weeks, the house of dot-com cards blew away, investors fled to higher ground, the easy money vanished, and the bullpen of techies was flushed out into the streets where they joined a gushing refugee tide of fellow geeks suddenly in grim oversupply. Tim’s company—once valued on paper at more than half a billion dollars—simply disappeared. The span of time from the last exuberant month of hiring forty new workers to the departure of the last employee of the entire company and the closing of the office was less than six months. The management team dispersed to find work elsewhere, and the IP (intellectual property) the company had developed was sold off for a few dollars to another company.

The company which bought Tim’s IP, by the way, had somehow managed to resist the nearly irresistable urge to load up with easy money and overexpand in the go-go years. Playing it close to the vest but maneuvering shrewdly to establish alliances with some key customers who eventually helped design and underwrite their development of pre-sold new products, they are currently enjoying a market capitalization of about fifteen billion dollars.

Last thing I heard, Tim was teaching at the Naval Academy.

ICARUS AND LUCK-OF-THE-DRAW CONVERGE

Bad timing? Overreaching? The abrupt demise of the once-great consulting firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc., was an unholy combination of the two.

Arthur Dehon Little was a brilliant MIT scientist who discovered acetate and then went on to create the world’s first management consulting company, in 1886. He gambled that many corporations might benefit from hiring a specialty shop periodically to do contract research and create new products, rather than maintain their own fulltime staff of specialists. He set up a lab for rent, and the concept was an instant success. Over the years the firm made significant contributions to a wide range of products and services, ranging from synthetic penicillin to Slim-Fast, from word processing to NASDAQ, from fuel cells to consumer electronics.

But for all the technical brilliance of many of its staff, ADL was a somnolent business enterprise. Practically devoid of commercial ambitions, it was led over the generations by senior management teams who sought nothing more than a comfortably reliable stream of interesting new projects from respected clients. Striving for aggressive financial goals and advantageous competitive positioning were simply not part of ADL’s DNA.

Until the guys from GE came to town.

By then, in the late 1990s, ADL had become a 3,500-employee company with some 50 offices and research labs in more than 30 countries, with half a billion dollars in annual revenue. Sounds successful, but that’s only if you looked at it in isolation. For almost one hundred years, it had been the premier consulting organization in the world, and post-WWII upstarts like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Booz-Allen, and other eager beavers strove relentlessly to equal its premier stature and clientele. But ADL remained Numeron Uno forever.

Well, not forever, as it turned out. While the gentlemen managing Numero Uno ambled amiably along, contentedly doing one interesting job after another, their competitors were turbo-charging the world of management consulting in the later decades of the 20th century. From its throne atop the industry as late as the 1960s, ADL watched others creep up toward them in staff, revenues, clients, offices, prestige, and power. This did not cause them detectable concern. Nor did they see any reason change their way of being when the others were at eye level with them. They may have occasionally noticed over subsequent years that they were no longer atop the list of management consulting firms, no longer Numero Uno, then that they had slipped out of the top five, then no longer among the top ten, next to be missing from the list of the top 25—wait! Wait just a minute here! Is that possible? There must be some mistake. Are you sure? ADL not even one of the top 25 consulting companies?

What the hell’s going on here, anyhow?

You might have thought that ADL’s board of directors would have asked that question many decades ago, but they too were largely drawn from the self-satisfied and self-referential ranks of the company, and the few outside directors seemingly drank the same stupor-inducing elixir that made competitive stature and organizational dynamism feel irrelevant if not downright impolite.

But some blinding flash of the obvious startled the boardroom awake one day in the late ‘90s. All these other consulting companies are growing like crazy and making money hand over fist. Might it be possible to actually improve the performance of Arthur D. Little, Inc.? Say, now there’s an idea!

Unsettled by this disturbing possibility, they found it within them to ask the executive leadership of ADL to step aside—the same leaders who had appointed them to the board. They realized they needed to look beyond ADL to find the management talent that could bring fresh insight, energy, and aspiration to the organization.

They found just the guy, or guys. The new CEO, a seasoned GE executive now heading a group of turnaround specialists, secured carte blanche from the newly shaken board to bring in his own senior management team, comprised of men who were also tough-minded former GE executives. The team had been working in recent years to rejuvenate laggard enterprises, and they seemed just the right tonic for slumbering ADL.

The team proved to be a little bit disrespectful of some cherished ADL traditions, of course, and made a point of skewering them to announce that a new day was upon the company. No element of corporate practice or culture escaped their this-is-a-new-day declaration. Big things fell with a clunk. No more flying first class. Little things fell with a clink. The free bagels and fixin’s historically set out every Friday in the hallways of ADL’s offices were pointedly banished “until such time as ADL’s profitability improves to the point where such luxuries are warranted.”

Once they had gotten everyone’s attention with the things that seemed to matter most to longtime ADLers, they set about the real work of restructuring the company. For starters, they realized that ADL’s true roots were in the contracted scientific and technological research that Arthur D. Little himself had launched over a hundred years before. And not, by the way, in the myriad “management consulting” practices that had gradually taken root over the years as various of the staff pursued new interests. The ADL labs and technology professionals were uniformly world class; the management consultants were not.

And so they began whacking anything that didn’t look like a science-based service. Their goal: prune ADL back to bedrock, where the competitive superiority was still palpable, and abandon the mile-wide-but-inch-deep distractions. Then, find ways to optimize the financial value of those core businesses.

How? Buried with ADL were some gems that, if standing on their own feet, might themselves be valued at prices far higher than the the current valuation of the entire company. So they planned to take various pieces of the business and spin them out into separate organizations. The fuel cell technology ADL had developed was an obvious candidate. Another: the computer services business.

Bear in mind that this was 1999, the height of the dot-com, internet-transformation mania. Computer-savvy talent was sine qua non for seizing the internet-based opportunities that abounded everywhere. ADL’s competitors were sprouting computer services consulting firms with growth rates of 100% per year or more—and their market capitalization was priced at something like $10 per dollar of annual revenue, versus ADL’s company-wide valuation of less than $1 per dollar of annual revenue. Seemingly, ADL’s own $150 million-per-year computer services group, laden with first-class talent, could itself bring in a billion dollars or more in an IPO, more than double the entire current valuation of ADL.

I thought it was a superb strategy. As the leader of one of those management consulting practices that was whacked, I had no qualms about being tossed out into the street. Not only was it the right thing to do (both for ADL and for me), but it was going to be financially advantageous to me. As a shareholder in ADL stock, I was delighted that someone was going to breathe some life into the moribund valuation of the shares I had been required to purchase as a partner in the firm and the additional shares I had accumulated through bonus and retirement allocations. Their stagnant value over the years perfectly reflected the firm’s own lassitude.

To put my money where my mouth was, I elected to delay the redemption of my ADL stock. As a separated partner, I had been given the option to “put” all my ADL stock back to the company at the time of my departure, cashing in everything at current share prices, or, alternatively, to sell 20% of my shares back to ADL each year for the next five years. I chose to lock in the latter option, fully confident that the later years’ sales would be at prices far, far in excess of the then-current valuation.

Wrong.

Very, very wrong.

That was when overreaching and lousy timing converged in a perfect storm, a perfectly lethal storm. Converting the undervalued elements of ADL into separate business ventures whose value could be optimized through IPO stock offerings would be expensive. Somebody had to pay for all the legal and financial and organizational arrangements, all the extrication of the units’ entanglements with the parent company, all the fees to the investment bankers who would make a market in the new stocks. It would take millions, tens of millions actually, for each such unit to be spun out of ADL.

The company didn’t have anything like that kind of money lying around, so the new management went out to borrow it from private lenders. They arranged to get their hands on more than a hundred million dollars, at hefty rates of interest and laden with excruciating penalties for delaying or missing any payments. But, hey, it was 1999, and anything with dot-com in the name was reaping tidal waves of money in IPOs, even businesses with no customers, no revenues, and nothing behind them, and here we had a real, honest-to-God computer services business with $150 million in revenue. The market had already established the value of these businesses at ten times revenue. How could we miss? How could we possibly miss?

Easy.

The bubble burst before they got to market with the IPO. Investors disappeared. Anybody out there? Hello? Hellllllooooo? Yoo-hoo? Got an IPO here. Let you have a share for twenty-five bucks. No? How about twenty? I can’t hear you. Hello? Fifteen bucks. Gimme fifteen and we’ll call it a deal. What about ten?

Psst. We’ve got more invested in it than ten. Can’t sell it for that.

Well, as it turned out, couldn’t sell it for anything.

Ahem. ADL? The repayment of the loan? I see you’re currenly delinquent on an installment. We had included certain provisions, shall we say, for such eventualities. Are you ready to make the payment? Oh, you’re not. Okay. Well, then, I think you’ll see here in paragraph 7.b.(2) that at this point I take your company and you take a hike.

The assets of a consulting company depart the premises via the parking lot and the subway and train stations every day. The assets of ADL, seeing the writing on the wall, decided its future was very bleak indeed and sought employment elsewhere. They took their own hikes, leaving a shell of a company behind.

In the bankruptcy sale, the flotsam and jetsam of once-great Arthur D. Little fetched $97 million—about 20% of its assessed value only a couple of years before. But of course the $97 million went straight to the lenders whose money had been spent on the failed spinoff/IPO strategy, and so the shareholders of ADL came up empty.

Those of us who had other investments or still had productive years of work ahead of us in which to recoup our losses adjusted okay, but many ADL retirees and/or their surviving spouses got Enron-ed. By company policy, their retirement money had been almost totally held in ADL shares which for generations had reliably pumped out generous dividends they could live on comfortably. Now those shares were suddenly worthless, and their retirement income vanished. I guess nobody ever thought about the risk being taken on their behalf.

My beloved mentor Leland (who knew when to eschew perfect grammar in favor of making his point) once said to me as I was on the verge of biting off more than I could chew, “My boy, when you want something real bad, that’s just the way you get it.”

SO CLOSE, SUCH A SHAME

“Have you guys seen this article?” Bob asked as he pushed the morning’s New York Times across his desk toward us, cranking it 180 degrees so we could read the headline: “Over Half of Chicago Babies Born to Unwed Teen Mothers”.

The rest of the article spelled out the grim statistical details. But the headline said it all. Over 50% of the infants in America’s second largest city were coming into the world in the care of teenagers who were little more than children themselves. Children who lived with their own mothers and (maybe) fathers, children who lived with their own grandmothers and (maybe) grandfathers, children who (maybe) knew the identity of the infants’ biological fathers but had little hope of ever raising the infant in full partnership with a young man maturing into a capable father himself. Children whose pregnancy and motherhood while still teenagers pretty much doomed any hope of their ever completing an education and securing an early-career apprenticeship that would equip them for a fulfilling vocation.

This was a social disaster-in-the-making for both the infants and their parents, not to mention the communities in which both would probably underachieve for the rest of their lives. My heart sank when I read the headline and the lead paragraphs. I knew something about this issue. I had written my Master’s Degree thesis on the subject of family syndromes that are associated with severe academic achievement. In that work, I had identified a number of syndromes that apparently result in bright kids doing unimpressive work in school, and one of the syndromes was illustrated by these inner-city dropouts.

By contrast with those of us who grew up surrounded by models of academic achievement and suffused with expectations—either supportive or demanding—that we ourselves would find academic pursuits rewarding, consider the plight of the largely black urban child. Their great-grandparents were actually forbidden to attend schools at all. Their parents and grandparents, if not forbidden to attend, were shut out of the schools the white students attended which were replete with the best of everything—teachers, facilities, textbooks and other learning materials, extracurricular enrichments, pre-college counseling, and the like. The black kids were relegated to the dregs of a “separate but equal” afterthought, deliberately hobbled by a society which liked to feel superior to them, however unwarranted and immoral the actual and perceived disparities might have been.

If such kids did somehow muster enough determination in the face of monumental discouragement to emerge with a degree, they were immediately confronted with blatant racism in the world of work. For jobs, for loans, for working capital, for anything that would enable them to get ahead, they were shoved to the back of the line or told that they were out of line entirely.

One of the ironies of our time is that entrepreneurialism is rampant in urban neighborhoods. The very kind of go-getter initiative that was celebrated by pro-capitalist organizations like “Junior Achievement” when us white kids showed a little creativity by selling Kool-Aid is still on display on every street corner in America’s inner city. Young free-enterprisers abound in urban neighborhoods. We just don’t happen to approve of the goods they are hawking—recreational drugs instead of Kool-Aid. Swap their line of goods for something more respectable to the greater society and we’d be lionizing these risk-taking, ambitious, business-oriented, hustling retailers and admiring the ingenious supply systems established by their network of wholesalers and distributors who operate under severe conditions of duress, given the billions spent by law-enforcement officials trying to put them out of business. Few “legitimate” businesspersons could succeed under comparably hostile circumstances.

What I discovered in my assessment of the situation under which these kids did or did not achieve academic success was that they suffered from a lack of what I dubbed “an investment mentality”. Whereas many of us had it drummed into our heads that withholding an immediate gratification today might yield a tenfold greater satisfaction in the foreseeable future, that premise and that promise are simply not operational in most urban neighborhoods. Their parents and grandparents are often not in a position to speak those words with conviction or credibility. And teenagers’ observations of their slightly older peers yields an even drearier prospect, given the prevalence of violence all about them. These are the neighborhoods where, surveys consistently show, teenagers typically do not even expect to be alive much beyond their twenties. And, tragically, the statistics prove their dismal predictions to be true in all too many instances.

And fifty percent of newborn Chicago is coming into this world? What chance do these babies have, anyhow? Is it really this dire for them?

No.

Actually, it’s worse.

Because, unlike babies being carried to gestation in the bodies of women in other circumstances, their mothers are woefully ill-equipped to care for them in utero. Largely ignorant of pre-natal nutritional needs of the embryonic child and bereft of formal pre-natal care, these mothers deliver underweight babies (officially, “low-birthweight” infants) who struggle for early survival and then cope for a lifetime with various deficits that compromise their health, requiring expensive chronic care from a variety of medical- and social-service agencies. Not to mention the fact that their health problems further sabotage their already dismal hopes for academic achievement that would be consonant with their inherent abilities and their deserving.

“Isn’t there something we should be doing about this?” Bob challenged. As a Vice-President of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Products Company, he had led a number of important initiatives in the world of maternal-and-child-health. We had been proud to participate in the creation of some of these programs to ensure that the latest and best clinical information and materials were available to caregivers at all levels. The work had been widely appreciated by parents and pediatricians and the obstetrical community—and by our clients at J&J. But now one of these clients was throwing down a gauntlet of a different sort entirely.

“Let’s find a way to beat this problem of low-birthweight babies,” Bob decided. “Nobody’s figured it out yet. How about you guys taking a crack at it. Come up with something J&J can back that would really make a difference.”

How could we resist?

Weeks later, we were summing up our initial findings. Days of meetings with pregnant single girls in nearby Trenton had left us dumbfounded and dismayed at the way they thought about their situation. Once they discovered they were pregnant, almost all had immediately bailed out of school. What’s the point, they seemed to be saying. I don’t have to put up with all that boring crap any more, I’m never going back, and besides pretty soon I’m going to have this cute little baby to play with all day long. And that baby is going to love me all day long right back, and then I’ll finally have everything I need. So they spent their days languishing in front of the TV, whiling away the days until their new little play pal arrived.

None of the fifteen or so with whom we met had any expectations that the biological father would be involved in the rearing of the child, and that was fine, too. Each girl carried a warm and cozy image of how it was going to be, just baby and me, cuddling each other into bliss ‘round the clock.

We never heard a word about the familiar difficulties that parents of newborns routinely experience. Nights of sleep made ragged from repeated interruption to feed a hungry infant or to soothe a cranky one. Smelly and messy diapers. Maddeningly inconsolable crying. Restricted socializing. Chronic tiredness. Money spent on Gerbers instead of movie tickets. Sudden trips to the pediatrician when ‘something’s just not right’.

These pregnant children were “expecting” all right, but they weren’t expecting a real baby. They were expecting a cross between Barbie and a new puppy.

And they were preparing accordingly. Which is to say, not at all. In our sample, we talked to only one who followed a respectable program of pre-natal care and regularly saw an obstetrician. The rest seemed to assume that their normal regimen of snacks and sodas and fast foods and, in all too many cases, cigarettes must be fine for the kid.

Well, actually, that’s not exactly true. To the contrary, our fundamental impression was they didn’t even think at all about the baby in its current configuration as a growing fetus. They had a massive blind spot for what was inside them at the moment. They thought only about the fully formed, perfectly adorable, healthy and irresistible cherub that would soon appear from between their legs and be presented to them in a supremely magical moment of womanly fulfillment, their baby’s tiny fingers delicately tickling their neck and face, like a Daddy-Long-Legs tip-toeing across downy skin.

No wonder they were ignoring pre-natal care.

So that was the heart of the challenge, we realized. How do we help these pregnant teenagers pierce the veil of denial which they have draped over the present while they chew gum and await the heavenly day of consummation? Unless they awakened to the reality of the fetus growing within, to its nature and its needs, there was no hope for their ever giving it and themselves the kind of pre-natal care that would produce a healthy infant and a capable young mother. Yet we were dealing here with a profoundly deep human instinct—denial—that would not yield readily to traditional methods of “education” and exhortation. Preaching and enlightenment were not going to carry the day.

And how were we ever going to get them into the hands of medical professionals who could help them take proper care of the fetus they were carrying? Many urban families have had unpleasant experiences with “the authorities”. Many of these teens had themselves instinctively avoided the very kinds of health facilities that could provide pre-natal care. All they had ever heard from such authorities was advice they didn’t want to hear, like stop smoking and practice safe sex—or, worse, be abstinent. No, this one would call for some different tactics.

So we turned to judo.

When faced with the daunting task of changing minds, I have found that the philosophy of judo frequently offers fresh perspective and a workable solution. What philosophy? Well, the Japanese linguistic root of “judo” is a combination of words that translate literally to “the way of softness”. It is also sometimes referred to as “the way of weakness” and “the pliant art”. But however you translate the words, the point is the same: your own power is inferior to the power you are contending with, and so you can not achieve your objective by using your own power. Try that, and you are certain to lose.

So, instead, you study the flow of power in the force you are contending with and determine whether there are currents there you could seize and deflect to your own ends. Is your much-larger opponent rushing toward you and about to flatten you, propelled by his massive size and weight? What would happen if you suddenly ducked very low and he, unable to slow his own momentum, then tripped over you and flattened himself on the floor beyond you where you, still standing, would now have the advantage over him?

I have never practiced judo physically, but I have often practiced it intellectually to develop a strategy in a seemingly daunting situation, and that’s just what we did here. The trick is to find the leverage point where the momentum of these kids’ behavior could be deflected to their own best interests.

We found it in TV.

These kids were hooked on TV, spending most of their days watching the tube. For eight, ten, twelve hours a day, TV was their companion and pretty much their life, vicariously transporting them from the dimly lighted room where they sat viewing to a wonderland beyond that they would never possess but might at least visit in their reveries.

What is more, TV has had from its first days an extraordinary power of enchantment that will impel otherwise sober individuals from America’s heartland to stand in the freezing cold of Rockefeller Center on a dank December dawn for a chance to catch Al Roker’s eye and wave frantically to their loved ones back home. Or go crazy when the camera in the ballpark sweeps past them sitting in the stands, broadcasting their image, for nanoseconds, to millions of TV sets across our land. Or buy some ill-crafted kitchen utensil in the store because the package label is emblazoned with a message saying “As seen on TV!”

We realized that TV was these kids’ new best friend and that it could be a powerful ally for us, if we could but find a way to harness the relationship.

Then the inspiration hit us all in a rush, and the concept was suddenly crystal clear:

“Would you like to see your baby on TV before it is born?”

Huh? What?

“Would you like to see your baby on TV before it is born?”

That was it!

The next day we presented the concept to our client. And I can say that of all the strategies I’ve ever been involved in, nothing has given me more satisfaction than the process we came up with:

We would launch a series of TV commercials on the daytime programs these kids were watching, presenting that very question: “Would you like to see your baby on TV before it is born? Free!”

We were pretty confident that the offer would prove irresistible. All the girl would have to do, the commercial would go on to say, was to come down to a local health clinic where they would “put her baby on TV” for her.

No matter that a sonogram isn’t exactly “TV”—it’s close enough.

And once at the clinic, and once she actually saw on a sonogram this live, kicking, tiny, vulnerable fetus squirming inside her at that very moment, two good things would happen. First, her veil of denial about the reality of this creature in utero would be pierced once and for all. She would be connected in an immediate, compelling way in the ultimate “teachable moment”. And for the longer term, we would have jump-started the dynamics of bonding and attachment by which both infants’ and parents’ will-to-thrive are mutually rooted.

Second, she would be physically in the clinic, and in the hands of professionals, dedicated to ensuring that she and her baby got the pre-natal care they both needed. The clinicians could seize that teachable moment. Initial care would be provided. Follow-up appointments would be established, and months later, there would be one less low-birthweight baby born in the world who would fail to thrive, dragging a befuddled young mother down as well.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Okay, that sounds immodest. But in truth it was brilliant.

Not because it was an elegant concept. It was brilliant because it actually worked. We established a pilot program at a public health clinic in New Brunswick, New Jersey. For the pilot, we didn’t even use TV commercials. We advertised “Would you like to see your baby on TV before it is born? Free!” with flyers distributed through high schools who kept rosters of pregnant drop-outs.

The first day of the program, pregnant girls showed up early. Their tangible sheepishness and some street-smart wariness was evident, but it yielded to almost brazen insistence. I want to see my baby right now! Can you really do that?! Hurry up!

More kids came the next day, and the next day after that.

The day after that, something less welcome came: Bob’s call.

“Did you see the ACOG sonogram advisory that came across the wires this morning?” he blurted. “It’s a killer! Can you believe the timing?! God, I can’t believe it! We’re wrecked!”

ACOG—the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology—is the official medical society for M.D.s who care for pregnant women. And the day before, exactly three days into our pilot program, they issued a pronouncement: due to uncertain or ambiguous possible risks to the fetus from overexposure to ultrasound waves (the medium producing the sonogram image), thereinafter the use of sonograms would be restricted to those situations where there was an indication of possible fetal distress or other clinical justification for exposing the fetus to these indeterminate risks.

Brilliant, yes. But dead.

The pilot program stopped that morning. Just like that. Pulled the plug. Over and done with. Gone.

The kids who had already been to the clinic kept up with their subsequent pre-natal visits and care, of course. If any damage had been done by their sonograms, it was already done. At least they’d be in competent professional hands to monitor the rest of their pregnancy and have early warning if anything was in fact amiss. But the rest of the pregnant girls in New Brunswick and Trenton and Chicago and wherever else would keep on ignoring their pre-natal regimens and keep on delivering low-birthweight babies.

Some years later, ACOG issued another sonogram advisory. False alarm. No problem. Go ahead and use sonograms as much as you want.

By then, of course, we were long gone off onto other things, Bob had retired from J&J, and the whole program was but a memory. Sad. Really sad. I don’t blame ACOG, of course. The primary precept of medicine is very clear: First, do no harm. If there was evidence of possible harm’s being done by sonograms, they had to take the most conservative course and restrict their use.

But I still ache for the lost opportunity. Today, pregnant women can go to the shopping mall, pay a few dollars, and drive away with full-color, high-definition DVD sonograms of their fetuses in action, mini-movies replete with a sound track—recordings of churning amniotic fluids and the baby’s squishy heartbeats. It’s a popular way to get a running headstart on proud parents’ collections of baby pictures.

I just hope a few of them are the kind of young girls we tried to help.

INTERCEPTION

It’s not as though “timing” only works against people. Mitch and I spent a lot of time as marketing consultants trying to conceive of the most effective possible way to persuade people that our clients’ products were just right for them, and timing turned out to be the key to revolutionizing our approach.

Our breakthrough conversation went something like this:

“So, let’s begin with this proposition: if the intended customer doesn’t ever really need it, there’s no reason for them to buy it, and no reason why we’d want to get them to buy it. Our clients might feel differently, but we’re not interested in just getting somebody’s cash register to ring.”

“Right. Unless a person actually needs the product, leave ‘em alone.”

“But let’s assume they do. But even if they do, they don’t necessarily always know that they do.”

“Or, look at it another way. They may know that they do, but that’s not a steady state. At certain times they are more aware that they need it than other times. It comes and goes.”

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way it is with me. Sometimes I’m thinking about some particular thing I may buy, sometimes not. Depends on whether the need for it triggered my thinking about it. So what if we could figure out when their awareness of the need is higher?”

“Let’s push it farther. How about figuring out the exact moment in their life when it is absolutely the very highest it could possibly be?”

“Yeah. You’ve got to figure that at some particular moment their ‘felt need’ for it is just about as high as it could ever get. If we could nail that, understand exactly when it is, and get to them right then, Bingo! Sale made!”

The term ‘felt need’ has loomed large in my lexicon ever since I first encountered it, in my graduate studies in educational psychology. I learned a very simple formula: motivation is produced at the conjunction of felt need and perceived goal. The adjectives are crucial in this formula. If the person doesn’t feel the need, it doesn’t matter. You may think—may know—that they need something, but if they don’t, they’re not going to be motivated to go after it.

Same with “perceived” goal. If they don’t see and comprehend the goal, can’t imagine it as something they want to attain, they’ll not be stimulated to move in that direction.

But put them together and you have action: I feel the need, and I see where I might get to if I attend to that need, so I’m ready to get cracking.

“Okay. So let’s see if we can nail this down to a process. We figure out what the deepest need is that this product can satisfy. Not the obvious, apparent need—a car is transportation, but it’s sure a lot more than that to most car buyers—but we figure out the ‘need’ that is powerful enough to get them to take action if they think it’ll get satisfied.”

“We’ll have to analyze the life-cycle of their thinking and emotions around a product, to figure out what it really means to them.”

“Right, and then discover the time—the moment, really—when that hits its peak. When they either are really, really feeling the need, or when they can see the goal so clearly they can taste it. Or both.”

Now our focus shifted to the next question.

“Okay, and if we figure out when that moment is, we can also figure out exactly where they are when it happens. It’ll be different for different products. For a car, it might be a moment when a guy is feeling embarrassed because his car is a gas guzzler, or can’t ford a stream like his buddies’ off-roaders can, or…”

“Yeah, so where would a person be when that hits them? You know, like the guy with the gas guzzler might be feeling a little silly when he drives up to the meeting of the local Democratic party’s enviromental task force.”

“Might be a good time to suggest a hybrid, if we could find a way to communicate with him at that moment.”

“Hmm. That’s a good angle. If we know the when, and we know the where, then we can scan the scene and see what’s there that could carry a message. Something or someone who could get their attention right then.”

By that time we knew we had a winning formula. Most marketers bust their tails trying to create a continuing stream of messages that will be distinctive enough amidst the clutter of other TV commercials and magazine ads and website pop-ups that the target audience will notice theirs. We were saying, forget about competing in the midst of that cacaphony. Forget trying to out-clever all those other voices raucously clamoring for attention. Just go find the person at the moment when they really want to hear what you have to say, and whisper quietly that you can get them what they want.

Suddenly the burden shifted from cleverness of message to ingenuity of time and place and channel of communication.

We put our formula to the test right away. We had been given an assignment by Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Products Division to create the marketing launch of a new liquid soap for bathing babies. We loved working with J&J, because they were committed to never launching a new product unless it was demonstrably, provably superior to every similar product current in the market. We always knew we were helping bring customers a better option.

We set about answering the first question: Who is the target audience, and at what moment do they most keenly feel the need that this product will satisfy?

About 3.2 million mothers were giving birth to a baby that year. So, conceivably, they were the target audience. But then we slashed that number in half. We realized that mothers who already had a child at home had already answered the question of what soap they would use on their baby, and probably already had some sitting around the bathroom. We’d be interested in getting their patronage later, but they weren’t the ones to start with. We wanted the first-time mothers, and there would be 1.7 million of them. Plenty for starters.

But when was the moment at which each of those women would be asking themselves or someone else what to wash their baby with? Presumably the moment was sometime between the day she discovered she was pregnant and the time of the baby’s first bath. But that was a span of seven or eight months. We wanted to get a lot closer to “when” than that.

So we studied the psychodynamics of pregnancy. We learned things that resonated with our personal experiences during our wives’ pregnancies. It went something like this:

In the first trimester, the woman is full of excitement with the news of her impending motherhood, with telling other people about it, with the fantasies of how it will be to hold her new baby, with the anticipation of the child’s growing up. Not thinking yet about washing the little tyke.

In the second trimester, she begins to relinquish flights of fancy and turn inward, hovering protectively over this fetus growing within her, now showing distinctive human life form on the sonograms. She correspondingly begins to shut down her intimacy with others, including her husband. It’s as though she is pouring all energy into the nurture of this now-rapidly growing infant within her. Not a good time to try to get her attention.

In the third trimester, however, little ripples of fear tingle through her. Oh, my God, I really am going to have a baby to look after. I’ve never had one before. I’m not sure I’ll know what to do. What if I do something bad. What if I drop the baby, or give it the wrong food, or…??? What if I’m a bad mother?

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Felt needs bubbling to the surface. And the perceived goal is quite clear: I want to be the best mother any baby ever had.

Now we were in the right time zone. But we had to drlll deeper. When, exactly when, might these questions come to clear focus? What would be the context, the trigger, the occasion in which bathing the baby would be right up front. At what moment would this singular issue arise?

Bingo! Childbirth education class, that’s when.

Most first-time mothers attend childbirth education classes at the hospital where they will deliver their baby, and among the topics the nurse-educator presents is the matter of how to safely and effectively bathe your newborn. Perfect timing.

That gave us the when, and it gave us the “where” at the same time. This was great. We knew the question of how to bathe the baby would arise, and there was a captive audience to speak to. Now we had to answer the next question: what is there in that room at that moment through which we could communicate with the mother-to-be? What vehicles could we use?

Well, one would be the teacher. Certainly the nurse-educator is an extraordinary “authority figure” in the environment and in the life of the mother-to-be. But even if it were possible to co-opt her into giving a sales pitch, we wouldn’t do it—we wanted no part of compromising the integrity of her role and mission. But we suspected these invaluable people could give us some insights and suggestions, and they did.

The greatest treasure J&J possesses is the undying respect of its customers. The company’s fund of goodwill is unsurpassed in my experience, equalled perhaps only by that of Mayo Clinic. The company discovered the value of that goodwill during a tragic episode in 1982 when some crazed person tampered with bottles of Tylenol, lacing the capsules with cyanide and then replacing them on store shelves where unsuspecting customers bought them. Seven people died as a result of ingesting the poisoned pills.

J&J sprung immediately into action without stopping to calculate damage to itself. Every J&J sales person in the field was mobilized instantly, dispatched to stores all across the country that carried Tylenol, with instructions to snatch up every single bottle to preclude possible spread of the problem. Some 31,000,000 bottles were retrieved and shipped back to the company almost overnight, and J&J’s competitors moved quickly to claim the newly vacated shelf space in pharmacies and grocery stores.

I was certain that the great brand “Tylenol” was a goner, never to rise again. But how wrong I was. Within days, J&J received literally hundreds of thousands of phone calls and messages of support from doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and ordinary customers. They all reiterated their belief that J&J was also an innocent victim of this sick act and wanted to know how they could help the company rescue the long-respected Tylenol brand and recoup its rightful share of the analgesic market. Despite an immediate drop in market share from 35% to 8%, these people saw to it that Tylenol’s position in the market was fully recovered within a year.

When we told childbirth educators that we were working on a new product from Johnson & Johnson, they beat us to the punch. Before we could ask, they instantly asked how they could help. They said they loved the company and would love to help it bring more good products to parents.

We turned them inside out, striving to understand what they did and why. They explained to us what subjects they covered in their classes, how they presented them, what questions and concerns were raised by the mothers-in-waiting, what teaching materials they used, what advice they gave (“We frequently recommend J&J products”), and what they saw as missing links in their work. This last item especially caught our attention.

There are always hinges in history, prior to which some important realization lies unrecognized, and beyond which it is common knowledge. The hinge is the seam between the two eras. At that time we were right on the hinge of the phenomenon known as “bonding” and “attachment” between parent and newborn. Only a few sophisticated authorities in the field of parental behavior had taken notice that this dynamic interchange might be a critically important element in the wellbeing of both infant and parent. We had been fortunate to read some of their work and wondered aloud if this might be something of interest to the childbirth educators. Would they be interested in presenting this phenomenon in their classes?

Yes.

Just what we hoped to hear, because this seemed to be a win/win/win situation. Parents would benefit from understanding this dynamic force. Childbirth educators would have enriched their curriculum. And J&J would have an opportunity to be present in the midst of it.

We booked the next flight to Cleveland to confer with the two doctors who had done the most to understand the phenomena of bonding and attachment. Drs. Marshall Klaus and John Kennell were pioneers in detecting the effects of physical contact between parents and newborns. When there was abundant touching and stroking, they discovered, the infants’ will-to-thrive seemed to be invigorated. And so did the parents’ will-to-parent. In the absence of touch, however, infants languished and parents forgot to be parents.

What?

Parents forgot to be parents. Drs. Klaus and Kennell told us that when premature babies were born and needed to be totally encased for days and weeks in plexiglass incubators, where they were literally out of touch all day long, parents who could not cuddle them got tired of sitting around and went home. And didn’t come back.

Some didn’t come back to retrieve their baby once the child was able to leave the incubator and go home.

What?

True. The hospital would call and say, “You can come and get your baby now.” Days later, no one had come. The hospital would put in a follow-up call. “Your baby’s ready to come home with you now.” Nothing.

The doctors realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. And so their groundbreaking research into the phenomenon revealed the withering of vitality caused by diminished touch.

“Guess what?” Mitch or I said to the other.

“What?”

“Bathing a baby is all about touching them!”

“And so, now that I think about it, are all the other J&J baby products—talcum powder, skin oil, shampoo, sunscreen! They all involve a parent’s caressing them onto the baby’s body!”

We were on a roll. Here was a vitally important new understanding that mothers and fathers needed to know—bonding and attachment are critical to your baby’s and your own life—and the products we were hired to promote actually could play a role in that process.

Now it only remained to translate the opportunity into something that would deliver those benefits to all concerned. Further consultation with our childbirth educators led us to the idea of producing a film they could use in their classes to awaken the mothers- and fathers-to-be to the phenomena of bonding and attachment, while simultanously providing an inconspicuous demonstration of the role that J&J products might play in the process.

One last refinement of our formula remained to be implemented. When the film, “Falling in Love with Your Baby—the importance of touch” was finished, including footage of a live birth, lots of touching, and a first bath using Johnson’s Baby Bath, we needed a distribution strategy. We wanted to find the most efficient way for J&J to get it into the hands of childbirth educators and onto screens in front of parents in those last weeks before the arrival of the baby. So we studied the patterns of childbirth among U.S. hospitals and discovered that nearly 80% of babies are born in just 1,300 of the 7,000 hospitals in the country. Those 1,300 became our primary target. But how to reach them?

Enter the American Hospital Association. A meeting with the head of their A-V department led immediately to their agreement to promote the film to their member hospitals, but even to go a step further. They would add it to their inventory of A-V materials and act as librarian for the film. Making such materials available to hospitals was their mission.

And, oh, one more thing: they would pay J&J a royalty for use of the film.

So the film went forth, eventually accompanied by samples of the product and discount coupons for future purchases. Johnson’s Baby Bath was successfully launched as a new product, as it turned out, on a budget so small as to be an inside joke. Years later, it continued to serve as the primary marketing vehicle for the product.

And the royalties were funding the marketing.

People will surprise you

THE PRIEST WISH

1968. First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey. Office of the young Associate Minister, Eliot Daley. The door is closed. Two people are within.

“Would you just read these vows with me? Please?” she implored. Her puffy face, middle-aged and well-used, was bright with anticipation that shone through a little too much makeup.

By the time she spoke those words, twenty minutes into our first meeting for pastoral counseling, I felt like I was in front of a captivating video game—the kind that make you dizzy by sucking you into a fast-moving scene that envelops your senses as it flings you through a simulated race course. I had the impression I was flailing out of control down a super-steep ski slalom or wriggling frantically to stay on track through a hyperspeed automobile race track. My mind was scrambling, trying to keep up with the whirling shifts and turns she had been pulling me into.

“It won’t take long,” she insisted with a coy little tilt of her head, patting the cushion beside her on the sofa.

I was still pretty green as a parish minister, and while I had studied a lot of psychology and done a fair amount of pastoral counseling, she was taking me on a very strange trip that felt dangerous.

“Lisa, something feels fishy,” I stalled, struggling to gain perspective on what was happening, “What’s this about?”

My experience has taught me enough to know that when things felt weird, it was time to say so and not just mindlessly keep playing whatever game was going on.

Being a minister is a strange vocation under any circumstances. To begin with, you’re dealing with the most ineffable and, some would say, questionable of “products”—God. Very slippery character, at best. Trillions of words in print and prayer have been offered up in the attempt either to probe for God’s existence, to connect with God, or to debunk the whole notion of God. Highly conjectural undertaking, to some minds. Compelling and self-evident to others. Somewhere in between, to most.

And to think that there are some people who actually spend their lives trying to help others negotiate the ever-changing terrain on which they and God meet, or may meet, or have met, or will meet, or…whatever. Ministers. What a mysterious calling, to present and broker the ultimate Mystery in the lives of others and in our common life.

There is an enduring desire for their ministrations, of course. People do have a deep-seated yearning to be embraced by the Creator of this confusing and oftentimes painful world we live in. I would say, in fact, that this yearning is universal—all human beings have a built-in connection to the Creator, but not all know what to make of it. Some patiently develop the capacity to communicate through it, while others react in frustration to the ambiguity and amorphousness of God’s presence—or seeming absence. At the extreme, they react by vociferously and even bitterly denying that there could possibly be Anyone home at the other end of the line. But enough people seem to be getting sufficient response, however dim or intermittent, to keep them turning back to it and tuning in regularly. And they customarily rely on those who have become ministers, rabbis, shamans, priests, or whatever to nurture and guide their communion with their God.

Some of these religious coaches are scurrilous frauds, of course, who use the neediness of seekers to amass a sick power for self-aggrandizement, usually at the expense of the gullible worshippers they mislead. Since time immemorial so-called “Christian” ministers have represented anything but truly Christian positions. As I write this, the disgustingly un-Christian recent words of Pat Robertson ring in my ears, calling for the assassination of foreign leaders.

What?! I beg your pardon. Jesus, the original “Christian”, was one who preferred to die than to kill. And Jesus was a pretty consistent booster of the Ten Commandments, one of which is “Thou shalt not kill”. There was no lingering qualification of that prohibition, like “except when we don’t like a foreign leader, or if someone has committed a crime that makes us angry and heartsick, or if advocating a killing will get me some applause from political leaders or fearful citizens to whom I pander.”

I guess anybody is free to take the name of the Lord in vain (another proscription in the Ten Commandments) by calling themselves “Christian” when in fact they are not, but I wish newspapers and other media would quit perpetuating the fraud (and misrepresenting the oft-abused Jesus) by reiterating the self-appelation. Their ilk should be referred to not as “Christian leader So-and-so” but, rather, “So-and-so, leader of a religious following that has taken the name ‘Christian’” or something like that.

Back off, Eliot. Get on with the story.

Okay.

So the story is that people really do want leaders who can lead them through territory they find murky. Sometimes the terra incognita is health care and medicine and surgery, other times the entangled jungle of legal contracts, still others the incomprehensible tangle of pipes and wires and computer chips wedged under the hood of the car. We need somebody who knows the territory to help us through it, and we willingly become dependent on them. Sometimes abjectly so, because we need to believe that even if we don’t understand, somebody does.

Ministers are stewards of this yearning, this dependence. People offer up their hope and their credulity, willing to believe the unbelievable or even the patently absurd (“Let’s go kill foreign leaders”), in their ferocious desire to believe that somebody has the answers they don’t.

The priest wish.

Couple that powerful dependence with the appeal, to some, of those who exude “authority” through their public prominence or their uniform or their commanding manner, and you have a recipe for self-delusion by the supplicant and for misuse of position by the one with the upper hand. Rookie policemen are astonished by the number of propositions they get from women who, for whatever reason, seem to like the idea of being screwed by a guy in a uniform with a badge.

Ministers—both male and female—experience a mild version of the same phenomenon. And so I found myself sitting with Lisa in my study at the church, listening to her plead with me to sit on the sofa with her and recite some vows. Which vows?

Marriage vows. The standard litany recited by a bride and groom.

“I think you need to tell me what this would mean to you, Lisa.”

“I just thought—well, you know—these vows are very powerful,” she offered.

“Yes, and that’s why you and Jeff exchanged them with each other when you married. And you’re still married. To him. Not to me.”

Lisa shifted uncomfortably, her face growing a little ashen and sad. “I was just sort of hoping…” She stalled. “I just…” A moment of silence. “I just…”

“Tell me where it hurts, Lisa”

Then the whole story gushed out. How as a young single woman in San Francisco she found it unsatisfying to hold down a 9-5 job waitressing or tending a counter in a retail store. How she liked money, but not working. How she liked sex, but not any boy in particular. How the two likes converged and created a path toward turning tricks with sailors for cash. How she became a full-time prostitute. How this haunted her now, every day, as a proper matron in the proper town of Princeton, New Jersey. How she lived in fear that her nice husband and her nice children would someday find out about that lamentable chapter in her life.

And where did reciting the vows with me fit in?

“I just kind of hoped that, you know, if I sort of married a minister, it would somehow make it alright. All those things I did. It would, you know, cover them over with, with, holiness or something.”

Turns out the conversation was all she needed.

I was raised in the Roman Catholic church before I switched, in my early 20s, to Protestantism. In making the switch, I secured the intellectual and spiritual freedom I did not experience as a Catholic, but I did miss one thing. I missed going to confession on Saturday afternoon, where I could name before another person my deepest sin of thought and deed, my most shameful behavior and, miraculously, have it somehow lifted a bit, so my soul could breathe again. The ritual of penance was an irrelevant afterthought that I dutifully performed, but that wasn’t what made me whole again—it was simply speaking painful truth about myself that did the healing.

So, too, for Lisa. She left knowing she was okay. Okay with me, okay with God.

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

Chuck Jones was a quiet, elfin kind of guy who sat scrunched in his comfortable old chair in a cozy office festooned with pictures of his family— The Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote, and Pepe LePew. They were his family, because he was their progenitor. Chuck Jones created these characters, and many more, in his storied career as one of the most gifted animators in history.

We talked about his work, and I said that his “Roadrunner” cartoons had a particular appeal for me that was somehow unlike the delight of his other celebrated work, such as the legendary Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that included characters like Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck. Did it just strike me as different, or was there something actually different about The Roadrunner?

“Well,” Chuck said with a smile, “good for you. You have picked up on something—a little game I played with myself. See, I was feeling a little burned out on doing yet another Looney Tunes episode, so I decided to set out a fresh challenge. I thought I ought to make the creative process a little harder on myself, to see if I could tap into some fresh energy.”

The challenge, it turns out, was to push himself to create a new cartoon drama within the boundaries of four absolute dicta:

Cartooning is a visual medium, and so it should be possible to tell the story entirely in pictures. That’s why there is no dialogue in The Roadrunner, unless you count “Beep-beep!” as dialogue.

There’s too much gratuitous violence in cartooning, he opined. So any aggression in The Roadrunner would be a pure expression of lex talionis…the law of the jungle. After all, coyotes have to eat something, don’t they?

Cartoons do seem funnier when there are some pratfalls and splats, but any of them in The Roadrunner would be strictly the result of retributive justice. That is, anything bad that happened to Wile E. Coyote would be as a direct result of his own actions backfiring on him.
Finally, no matter what manner of mayhem Wile E. Coyote planned in order to turn the Roadrunner into a meal for him, the Roadrunner could never leave the road. He had to cope with these ambushes without abandoning his eponymous territory.

No wonder lots of us have a special appreciation for The Roadrunner.

And now, many years later, I have a special appreciation for how satisfying it must have been for him to push himself into uncharted territory. I did that a couple of times, and they remain among the very most satisfying experiences of my life.

I began “jogging” way back in the 1960s, when very few adults ventured forth to deliberately break into a sweat on a daily basis. We early joggers were considered slightly freakish, bounding along in thin-soled tennis shoes that provided none of modern-day athletic shoes’ shock-absorbing protection for vulnerable knees and hips. As a result, many of us battered our lower extremities into submission within a decade or so, unable to continue so-called high-impact training even once the well-cushioned running shoes became ubiquitous. The damage had already been done. I was forced to relinquish jogging in favour of cycling after about ten years of abusing my joints.

But before that happened, the YMCA of Princeton decided in 1977 to capitalize on the emerging running craze by staging a pair of runs—one a three-miler, and the other a “half marathon” of thirteen miles. My jogging partner Bob and I strolled up to the starting line to attempt the three-miler, which felt like plenty of challenge to me. Bob was a lean and fit athlete who had done longer distances that I was accustomed to. But I weighed over two hundred pounds, as always, and I had never jogged farther than two miles before. In fact, I hadn’t run at all for the previous month due to a leg injury. Three miles seemed like a major challenge for me.

Several hundred other joggers and some serious runners milled about the intersection of Bayard Lane and Hodge Road next to the “Y”, studying the maps showing the three-mile and the thirteen-mile routes. “Hey, Eliot,” Bob said, “look at the longer course—it heads out over the hills on The Great Road, and the four-mile point is at the intersection of Cherry Valley Road. Think we could possibly make it that far?”

Well, I thought, what the heck. Once voiced, the idea became inevitable. Let’s give it a shot. My wife Patti and kids—15, 13, and 10—had gathered nearby, ready to root us on. So I went over to them and said to Patti, “Bob and I are going to try to make it all the way out The Great Road to Cherry Valley. After this thing starts, hop in the car and drive out there to pick us up, okay?”

The kids’ gush of enthusiasm, coupled with Patti’s fleeting look of concern for my injured leg, instantly catalyzed my resolve to tackle the challenge. When the gun went off, Bob and I aimed our bodies down familiar roads that were suddenly uncharted territory for me.

The Great Road is hilly. Very hilly. I was unaccustomed to hills, doing most of my jogging on the absolutely level dirt pathway along the Delaware-Raritan canal that runs for miles through Princeton. The hills took their toll quickly, and I nearly had to stop and walk before finally plodding up to the crown of the ridge, only a mile above the intersection below where my family would be mercifully waiting to load my aching body into the car and haul me home for a cold drink and a warm shower. Every joint in my body was begging for mercy with each jarring step, and my lungs felt like razor blades were bouncing around in them. I staggered down the backside of the ridge toward the Cherry Valley Road, determined to put on a good face as I moved into sight of my family.

And suddenly, there they were up ahead. The station wagon was right there at the side of the road, the tailgate flung up, my kids all perched on the back bumper wildly clapping and cheering as I approached. Oh, God. They are there. Thank you. I am so tired. I hurt so much. Just let me make it these last few steps without keeling over!

The kids kept on cheering, and as I grew closer a quiet horror seeped through my tortured mind. I began to make out what they were saying. It was—it was—no, they couldn’t be saying, “Way to go, Dad! Keep it up, Dad! Hang in there, Dad!”

What was wrong with them?! Didn’t they know this was the end for me? Didn’t they know I was utterly done in, finished? What’s going on, anyhow?

By the time I was fully within range of hearing them, I knew the awful truth. They expected me to go on, just like the rest of the runners all around me were doing. They could not imagine that their dad was going to simply drop out. Quit? Stop where others continue? This was not the Dad they knew. And so, I realized with full horror now, they could not imagine my jerking to a halt and begging for ride home to a warm bath.

Shit.

I did a quick calculation in my head. The course was shaped like a capital “P”. The lower base of the “P” was the four miles out to this intersection. The loop was about five miles among rolling farmlands before reconnecting for the final four-mile return up and over the hilly Great Road that had just carried us out here from town.

What else was I to do?

“Okay, guys,” I choked out as I lumbered by. “Wait here. I’ll be back.” And then with a final afterthought yelled to Patti, “If I’m not back in two hours, come look for me somewhere along Province Line Road.”

Like a man doomed to his last trudge from a cell on Death Row to the lethal chamber that awaited him, I ruefully rejoined the flock of runners continuing along through the intersection—many of whom were far out of sight, and very few of whom were behind me at that point.

I do not know how I made it around that next section of the course. It was five miles over hills so steeply up and down that a seasoned marathoner of my acquaintance, who had come up from Georgia just to do the race, said he’d never run it again. The severe inclines on Province Line Road, he said, were dangerous to a runner’s musculature.

I also do not know—simply can’t recall—whatever became of Bob. I don’t remember when we separated, and I can’t reconstruct whether he ever did the whole thirteen miles or not. I think he probably did. The fact that I cannot today conjure up any detail is a reflection of the fact that it took absolutely all the concentration I could possibly muster to put one foot in front of the other, time and time again, as I staggered along those country roads.

I was progressively more and more alone, as the other runners disappeared one by one over the crests in the roadway ahead of me. Soon I was stumbling along in solitary agony, wondering what manner of madness propelled me, what could drive me to persist in such truly torturous punishment of myself. Every joint in my legs and hips screamed with pain. They felt like they were lined with sandpaper, abrading my flesh and bones and nerve endings with every movement.

This is nuts. Just stop, sit here in the beautiful countryside, and let Patti come get you. She knows the course route.

Yeah, but maybe I’ll just go on a little bit more. I think I can make it a little farther

Just stop now. Don’t be stupid

Well, after a few more steps. Maybe just over this next crest.

The dialogue never stopped. My sane brain counselled a sensible declaration of “Enough!” I had already far surpassed any distance I had ever before pushed myself to go. Surely that was plenty enough victory, wasn’t it?

But something else had taken over. I was far beyond my supposed limits, but I was reaching into some new realm of myself where I had never been before. I was pulling up something mysterious that was enabling me to override the terrific pain and the sensible suggestion of “enough”, enabling me to plop my foot down one more time. And one more time after that. No logic to it. No precedent for it. No promise of anything beyond that one step. Just take that one single step. And then see what happens next.

And so it went until the roller coaster hills of Province Line Road were behind me and I was stumbling along Cherry Valley Road toward the intersection with The Great Road where I would finally find an end to my torture. There was only one other runner behind me, hobbling painfully along somewhere back there. The fastest had completed the race long ago, four miles down the road back in Princeton, and were enjoying the accolades of their loved ones. I was now an afterthought. The barriers and police officers that had guarded the runners the first time through the intersection were no longer in evidence as I approached the intersection.

But, thank God, Patti and the kids were there. And so was the car. The car! Oh, I’ve never been so happy in my life to see a car!

Of course, my children cheered wildly and rooted me on, as though I were now going to run back up over the hills of The Great Road into town. But the thought of continuing was of course utterly inconceivable. I had long since drawn out every bit of determination and willpower that my soul possessed, and had even discovered unknown reserves there that I had desperately clawed to the surface to keep me going, one jarring step at a time. Keep going? Not a chance.

But of course I did it anyhow. Turned the damned corner onto The Great Road and headed up the hill. Mostly a blur now. Just digging deep. And then digging deeper. Soon it became a kind of miracle. How was this possible, I began to wonder, to reach into an empty vessel and yet draw something more from it. I knew I had never, ever been in this territory before. But don’t question it. Just keeping on keeping on. Only a few fleeting memories of that last section of the course. I remember slowing to walk a few steps up the steep hill near Rosedale Road, acutely conscious of my hip joints feeling like molten raw flesh riddled with frayed nerve endings that were shooting flashes of electricity. I wondered if I had done some permanent damage to myself.

The police were in the final stages of removing the protective barriers on Nassau Street as I stumbled along toward the finish line at Palmer Square. Everyone else had finished the race already, and they were shutting up shop. The finish-line personnel closing up shop were still able to record my time, though, and many of the other finishers were lingering about in clusters cooling down and gulping water and sharing stories of the run with family and friends. As I lumbered across the finish line I noticed a few looking my way with knowing head-shakes of wonder and smiles of encouragement, as though they had a sense of how much I had suffered.

I can sum up the experience very succinctly: Nothing I have ever done by myself has hurt more or felt better. That was the way I described it then, and it remains true to this day.

Years later, our son Jad was about to run his first marathon, twenty-six miles up along the Big Sur highway south of Carmel, California. I went there to cheer him on. The night before the race, the runners gathered in nearby Monterey for their traditional “carbo loading” dinner of spaghetti. The keynote speaker was all-time great marathoner Frank Shorter who said to the assembled runners who tomorrow would be in agony on Highway 1 up the coastline, “To me, the heroes and heroines in the marathon are not the ones up front. It’s the ones at the back of the pack. People like me only have to put up with the pain for a little over two hours, but some runners—some of you—will suffer through this race for four or five hours or more, hurting every bit as much all that time as those who finish in the top ten tomorrow. I don’t think I could ever muster that much will power, to put up with the pain that long.”

Well, of course he could have and would have. But it was a monumentally graceful thing to say, touching the heart of this back-of-the-pack sufferer.

Remembering the pain, I resolved to train properly in conditioning myself to do the second annual Princeton half-marathon the following fall. I ran for months, working myself up to a daily routine run of six or seven miles. By race day, I was in the best condition of my life.

Two thirds of the way through the run, as I came up Cherry Valley Road toward the intersection of The Great Road that would bring me—still in company with other runners—back to the finish line in Princeton, I thought to myself, “This is actually pretty boring. Last year it was a fabulous challenge. It cost me so much. It showed me so much. Today it just feels like a chore. Why did I spend all those hours running up and down roads here and in Maine getting ready to do this when I could have been doing other things—playing tennis, writing books, hanging out with the family? I don’t think I’ll do this any more.”

And I didn’t.

My dropping back to a residual level of exercise—tennis or aerobics for an hour or two every day—didn’t equip me, however, for the other most-satisfying challenge I took on. Sometime in February, 1996, my phone rang. It was Greg, a lifelong pal from high school and college who was the best man in our wedding. Greg is a running nut. Several marathons a year are not enough for him. He also runs these maniacal races up and down mountains over rock-strewn hillsides for hours at a time. Way out of my league.

“Hey, El. Greg. Got an idea.”

Greg is never short on ideas. Fairly bursting with itchy energy, he owns and operates one of the most dynamic and entrepreneurial brains on the planet. Ranching. Farming. Hydroelectric generation. Specialty coffee. Begonia propogation. Winemaking. The notches on his belt run all the way around, marking numerous successes. With his leftover energy, he flings his body around race courses with enthusiastic abandon.

Okay, Greg. What’s on your mind?

“This is the year we turn sixty, and I think we need to do something—well, you know—something special to show ourselves we’re not over the hill yet.”

Oh, oh.

“So I was thinking. How about you and me and some of the rest of the guys getting together to climb a mountain together? Maybe the kids, too.”

The ‘rest of the guys’ would mean our college gang. And his kids and my kids were in great shape, all having run marathons themselves recently.

I, however, was not even close to being in that kind of condition. So I asked him for some more details.

“Mount Shasta. Great mountain. Here’s the deal. It’s a little over fourteen thousand feet, see. And we can drive up to about six grand, so it leaves only about eight thousand feet of elevation we’ve got to climb. Of course, it’s all snow cover and glacier even in summer, so we’ll need to use crampons and ice axes but that’s no big deal.”

And how long would this take?

“Well, see, here’s the deal. I think we should do it in a single day. That’s the challenge. Most people take a couple of days—even three. But I think we can make a real statement if we do it in a single day!”

My mind was whirring with the calculations. Eight thousand feet of elevation, trudging through snow. Hell, walking through snow on a level surface is pretty hard work by itself. But going uphill, eight thousand feet of rise—and then back down—in one day. Are you sure this is do-able?

“No sweat,” says Greg with characteristic confidence. “We just have to get ourselves in great shape.”

Now I know I’m in trouble. If Greg, who’s always in great shape, thinks this little venture is going to require him to upgrade his conditioning, I’m may be in for more than I can handle.

“I’ve already talked to a guide who’ll lead us up. We’ve been up there before but I think it makes sense to get a local pro. It’s a long day, but it’s do-able. You’ll see.” He spoke so confidently that I came away with the distinct impression that Greg and his son had done this climb before, so I thought that, what the heck, let’s give it a shot.

I asked what special training he was doing. He shot back a bunch of numbers about settings and drills on the StairMaster step-exercise machine lots of fitness centers have. Get yourself to these levels on a StairMaster, he recommended, and it’ll be a piece of cake.

Well, I didn’t belong to a gym at the time and my tennis club didn’t have a StairMaster. But the thirty-eight story apartment building we were living in at the time did have thirty-eight flights of stairs entombed in the concrete stairwell build for fire-escape protection. So the next morning, I laced on my hiking boots, strapped on a backpack such as I would carry on our climb of Mount Shasta, and took the elevator to the lobby, carrying a couple of bottles of water. I crossed the lobby to the door into the stairwell, the concierge following my progress with a puzzled look. Through the door and up the first flight of stairs, and then onward and upward. Huffing and puffing as I went, I made it to the top without too many rest stops along the way.

I returned the next day, and the next, and the next. Soon I was making several loops—climb to the top, take the elevator down, climb up again. After a while, I was bringing several gallon-sized water jugs with me, to deposit them on the landings every ten floors or so to grab a drink as I chugged by on my ascent. Given the sweat I worked up in my labours, my descents in the elevator were increasingly rank, and every time I entered the elevator on the thirty-eighth floor I hoped no one else would get aboard anywhere on my trip down to the lobby lest they keel over from my body fumes.

I quickly discovered that my Walkman radio didn’t get any reception in the concrete-and-steel chamber that enclosed the fire stairs, and I soon became tired of the same old music tapes. By this time, I was climbing for more than an hour every morning and mounting even lengthier climbs on the weekends. My goal, of course, was to eventually climb eight thousand feet in that stairwell without stopping—some twenty “laps” of the thirty-eight flights each. Almost eight hundred flights of stairs. At the pace I had settled into, this would represent about eight or nine hours of continuous climbing up the stairwell before I could be confident I was fit to attempt Mount Shasta in one day.

Patti came to my rescue. She discovered that the Boston public library branch close to our apartment had an excellent selection of books on tape, and so for the next few months she kept me well supplied. I listened to a wonderful range of works, most of which I would never otherwise have found time to read, as I clumped up those stairs for hours on end.

Meanwhile, our oldest daughter Alison and our son Jad were maintaining their marathon-level fitness through their regular training regimens, in anticipation of joining me in making the climb. (Our other daughter, Shannon, herself a veteran of a number of marathons, was unable to break away for the adventure.) We seemed well on track to meet the challenge that Greg had laid before us.

Nine of us converged on the little town of Mt. Shasta, at the base of the mountain, in mid-June. This is the optimum time of year to ascend to the summit. There is little chance of bad weather, and the snow is still firm enough at the higher altitudes to provide footing for crampons and ice-axes. Later in the summer, it becomes slippery, sort of like cold oatmeal.

The nine included Greg and two of his young-adult children, me and two of mine, three of our friends from college. Our guide joined us for lunch the day before our ascent to brief us on what would happen the next day. We would arise and leave our motel about 1:30AM and be at the parking lot at 6000’ elevation by a little after 2:00AM when we would commence our climb. He warned us that the effort would be very strenuous and might require that we adopt the “rest step” technique as we got into higher elevations where breathing would be difficult. The rest-step, it turns out, is a way to pitch your front boot and crampon into the slope ahead of you, kicking a step into the slope, but then leaning your weight back on the rearward foot to rest a moment before expending the energy to lift your entire body to higher level of your front foot.

We also discussed safety rules and the possibility that a sudden summer storm could arise and “white out” the upper elevations even on a day that until then had been sunny and bright. That would occasion an immediate retreat back down the mountain as fast as we could walk or slide on our rears.

And we agreed on two ways to voluntarily end the climb short of reaching the summit if needed. The first bail-out point was at Rose Lake, a misnamed plateau on the side of the mountain at 10,300’ elevation. (Nearly year-round snow cover on the mountainside made the “lake” a factual description only during August when the thawing crept down to that point and captured some melt in the swale there.) The guide said that anyone who needed to quit the ascent at that point would be able to make their way back down alone, as the track was pretty well marked and there would be other hikers along the trail between there and the parking area. Beyond that point, he said, the inability of any individual hiker to go on would signal the end of the attempt. No one would be left alone on the mountain above Rose Lake; the way back down was not evident and there was at least one crevasse in the glacier that could spell the end for a solo climber. And, of course, no one would be left to sit alone to await the eventual return of others who had climbed on above and beyond.

We spent the rest of the afternoon organizing our gear, loading our backpacks with water and power bars, and trying to imagine what lay ahead. We blew through an early dinner and went to bed before dark.

Our alarm clocks went off all too soon, and half an hour later we were clambering out of the cars around 2:00AM in the parking area at 6,000’ elevation. Ambient light from the stars and moon illuminated our scene remarkably well, and there was no need for flashlights then or later. We carried our crampons as we shuffled through a relatively level plateau for the first hour, then secured them to our boots as the mountainside began to incline sharply upward and we began to lose traction in the snow.

The trek up to Rose Lake took about six hours, and it was largely unremarkable. Once there, two of our party declared that they had had enough. The combination of the altitude plus the difficulty of slogging through deep snow had simply exhausted them. They would rest up for a while, and then make it back down to town and await our return that night.

Then everything changed. The next eighteen hours were nothing at all like I had expected.

I had expected that such a close-knit group of family and lifelong friends would be chattering amiably for hours on end as we labored alongside each other in an arduous effort to do something very difficult together.

I had expected that I would regularly refresh my body by drawing on the six quarts of water and the dozen or so power bars I had stashed in my backpack.

I had expected that my months and months of solitary training in that stupid concrete stairwell would have prepared me to ascend 8,000 feet of Mt. Shasta with a modicum of comfort.

Wrong.

Once uphill of Rose Lake the mountain became very, very steep as we struggled up the face of Red Banks. Each person was totally focused on kicking a boot into the hillside at mid-shin height to blast the next “step” in the snow. And some, like me, found themselves employing the rest step far sooner than anyone had predicted it might become necessary. Not a good omen.

But most curiously, nobody talked to anybody else. Each of us was totally self-absorbed. While anybody in the group would have willingly, gladly done anything required to help another, that was an irrelevancy. In point of fact, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to help another. It was an illustration of that unfortunate axiom, “Every person for him/herself.”

Kick and plant a foot out front. Rock back and take a breath. Hoist up on the front foot. Kick forward now with the other foot. Rock back and rest. Hoist up on the newly planted front foot. Kick, plant, rock, rest, hoist, do it again, and again, and again.

This is not a fast way to ascend a mountain, but it was the best I could manage, and soon I found myself in familiar territory—bringing up the rear. The fittest among us made steady progress up the long, steep face of Red Banks much faster than I could possibly move. My son Jad seemed scarcely to know he was in a state of exertion, almost strolling up the hillside in places so steep that you could reach out and touch the slope like a wall before your face. But then he has completed “Ironman” triathlons that require the racers to swim more than two miles, jump on a bike and pedal for 112 miles, and then dismount to run an entire 26-mile marathon—all without stopping. Nine- or ten-hour long competitions at full bore were a regular feature of his life, so he crested the ridge at the top of Red Banks a good hour ahead of me, along with some of the others.

I had not imagined the solitude, nor had I imagined that I would forget—yes, just plain forget—to avail myself of the water and nutrition that was weighing down my backpack. So intense was my concentration on making that next kick into the snowy wall in front of me that I simply never thought of anything else, including the provisions strapped to the outside of my body that could have made the task so much easier if I had put them on the inside of it. (I once travelled to Alabama to cheer Jad on in a major national triathlon competition to qualify for the big Ironman finale in Hawaii. Though a seasoned and nationally ranked competitor, he had a brain cramp that day and somehow neglected to consume his power bars and energy goo capsules that were readily at hand on his racing bike pouch during the hours-long ride. He “bonked”—racers’ lingo for simply running out of gas and barely even finishing the course at all, let alone finishing strong and high up in the rankings. Afterward his coach asked him sardonically, “Jad, exactly what is it that you don’t understand about nourishing your body during a race?”)

Most of all, I had never expected that my somewhat melodramatic dedication to climbing stairwells at sea level in Boston would prove nearly irrelevant at 12,000 feet, 13,000 feet, 14,000 feet. My personal physician—a rabid marathoner and, more to the point, an expert in high-altitude effects on hikers who runs altitude-sickness clinics at 17,000’ in Nepal—had assured me that I’d be fine. I had asked him about going out to spend time on Mt. Shasta early to get acclimated to the higher elevations, or perhaps adopting a regimen of taking Diamox, a pharmaceutical that affects the dilation of capillaries in the brain to minimize the adverse effects of significant elevation changes. I had used it in the past to prepare for ski trips high up in the Rockies, and it always seemed to help.

“No need. You’ll be up and back down,” he said, “before your body has a chance to know it’s been oxygen deprived.”

Yeah, well, guess again. My body was screaming “Mercy!” all the way from Rose Lake to the crest of Red Banks. My legs, of course, were fine. After all the time in the stairwell, they were like pistons. I think I could have climbed non-stop up 15,000’ or more of vertical elevation—at sea level. But I just couldn’t get enough oxygen into my body to fuel it. I was dying a little every minute, stepping up or resting back.

The upper lip of Red Banks at 13,000’ is very pronounced, the steep face suddenly flattening out completely like the edge of a table. As I struggled the last few steps, I looked up and saw Jad standing right at the lip. I don’t remember exactly what he said—but it was something encouraging and tender and proud of his old man—and it triggered a flood of tears from me. I had worked so hard, so damned hard, hour after hour after hour, and my lungs were killing me. I was utterly spent. I have never been so tired in my life. The first half-marathon was infinitely more painful, but what I felt at the crest of Red Banks was total, utter exhaustion. My body was depleted of everything but empty aching.

The rest of the group were sitting in a cluster on the small plateau atop the Red Banks ridge. I don’t know how long they had been there, but it was time enough to be concerned about Eliot who had lagged so far behind. Good and gracious friends all, they had (unbeknownst to me) easily reached the conclusion that this would be the termination point of this day’s assault on the summit of Mt. Shasta. There was no way Eliot could go on, they had reasonably concluded, and our agreement was that when one had to call it a day, they all would.

I knew nothing of this, of course. I shuffled over to join them and—what’s this? They are…drinking water, and eating power bars. Hey. Wait. Now there’s an idea! It was well after noon, and the first time in ten hours that it had occurred to me to care for my body. I sat down with them and glugged some water, chomped two power bars, and gradually felt some life begin to rekindle in my torso. No one seemed in a hurry to get up to continue the ascent to the summit, so I enjoyed the extended recess with them. Little did I realize that their leisurely lolling about reflected their mutual understanding that the next climb was back down, not further up.

I began to have some concern. Our guide had said that we needed to make every effort to summit by 1:00PM in order to be able to complete our descent by dark. It was already well past 1:00PM, and we had more than 1,000’ of ascent left—all of it up a nasty slope very well named “Misery Hill”.

I realized I still had four or five quarts of water in my backpack—at two pounds per quart—and that I’d need only two, at most, for the rest of the ascent and the descent. I poured out the rest, and then I remarked that time was slipping away and proposed that we had better get underway. There was a quick round of eye-checking among the group, silently asking each other if this was okay. They somehow reached the unspoken conclusion that they might as well take advantage of Eliot’s apparent rejuvenation and determination to press on, or at least to see how far he might be able to get before we all turned back. With that, we got up, stretched, and each made our way over to the narrow ice-bride across a deep chasm in the glacier right above us and began our ascent of Misery Hill.

Misery Hill was a replay of Red Banks. The fittest continued apace, albeit not without extreme effort. But my daughter Alison elected to keep me company as I soon slid to the rear of the ranks and slipped off the pace once again. My brief replenishing of fluid and calories wore off in a matter of minutes, and I was almost immediately resigned to rest-stepping—with increasingly attenuated rests on each step. The altitude was simply killing me. Some hours later we eased over the shoulder at the top of Misery Hill and saw the nearly flat expanse of the Summit Plateau spread before us. We had made it!

Well, not quite. There, perhaps a quarter of a mile across the mild upslope of the Summit Plateau was the true Summit—a spike rising some seventy-five or a hundred feet higher. The rest of the party had already ascended the peak, put their names in the registry there of those who had “summited” Mt. Shasta, and were making their way back across the plateau toward us.

Alison and I sat down right where we were, on the lip of the plateau. I was finished. It wasn’t just the sight of the others heading our way, or the knowledge that my continuing to struggle to the ultimate summit might dangerously delay our descent. That took some heart out of me, but what I knew beyond doubt was that I simply could not take one more step toward that summit. Not one. Not one step. Even if I had known that a helicopter were coming to whisk me away an instant after my completed ascent, sparing me the effort of descent, I couldn’t have made my body go an inch further.

I had proved to myself in the first half-marathon that I could call forth more from myself than I ever imagined. I knew what it meant to go beyond where you could possibly go. But I also knew I had been that far and then some. I was finished. Utterly, completely, totally finished. If someone had put a gun to my head and told me to keep moving toward the summit or else, I guess I would have just awaited the sound of the weapon discharging.

I was close to the summit. So close. Just steps away, really. So very, very close. But I was totally gonzo. Bonked. Finished. Kaput.

All my hours of training in that silly stairwell, all those hours of climbing and drinking and sweating, all the weird looks from my companions shrinking from this rancid creature riding the elevator down with them—it was all to end with getting close. That’s all. Getting close.

For an instant I felt a surge of regret for Alison sitting amiably beside me. She had come all this way, put in all this effort, only to end it by just getting close to the summit—all because she had elected to stick alongside her dad. But I know her better than to believe that the same feeling had taken hold of her, and my own regret evaporated quickly.

I made it clear to the others as they approached that I was all through, lest they be concerned about the already delayed timing of our descent. We could now get on with heading down the mountainside.

That was when one more expectation came a cropper. I’d imagined that coming down would be a lot easier than going up. And while the exertion level is certainly less, conditions on the mountainside had changed. The long morning and noonday of bright June California sunlight had been at work on the snow, and now it was the consistency of mashed potatoes. Coming up, every forward foot plant had required a kick into the snow slope just ahead. Now, coming down, every foot plant slipped this way and that into the snow before packing it solidly enough under foot to bear the weight of stepping down onto it. Each step was an exercise in balance and restraint, and there were 8,000’ of downward steps that lay before us.

Well, not entirely. On the very steepest slopes the snow was receptive to our efforts to glissade. Put simply, a glissade is turning your body into a human luge and sliding down the hill on your butt and back. The speed and direction of the slide is controlled by the use of the ice axe. Sounds like fun, and it is. Sounds pretty easy, and it isn’t.

You hold your crampon-clad boots high in front, so as not to snag their fang-like cleats in the snow at high speed and tear a muscle or break a leg. This means, of course, that the entire time of a glissade is the equivalent of a long-held stomach crunch. You steer and brake with the ice axe, held across your midsection like a double-ended paddle on a kayak. By digging the handle of the ice axe into the snow on one side, or the blade on the other, you turn right or left. Occasionally in at a high-speed glissade, the blade digs in too deep and gets viciously yanked away. It’s hard to hold on, but worse to contemplate letting it go and as you whiz on down, having later to retrieve it by rest-stepping back up the mountain once the now-uncontrolled glissade comes to a natural halt on shallower terrain hundreds of vertical feet below. I held on for dear life.

Several quarter-mile long glissades put me into a wonderfully dopey frame of mind. Remembering the torture I had experienced on those steepest of hillsides—the only ones capable of supporting a glissade—I savored the totally irrational glee of feeling that I was “getting even”.

Strangely, the descent was also solitary. No jubilation. No satisfied chatter. Just eight people scattered widely apart on the slopes, going about the work of getting back down the hill that had just taken so much out of us. We arrived back at the cars in the gathering darkness, eighteen hours after we had started the day in starlit quiet. No conversation. Just exhausted grunts.

Well, there was one comment. Our guide mumbled quietly, mostly to himself, “I’ll be damned. You can do it one day.” Turns out that in four years of guiding on Mt. Shasta, he’d never attempted to summit in one day before. The usual plan is to spend one day reaching Rose Lake, and a second day going up Red Banks. Day three is spent reaching the summit and returning to Rose Lakes or perhaps getting all the way back down. But dear old Greg had managed to leave our guide, too, with the impression that this was child’s play. In his confident palaver about having a friendly relationship with Mt. Shasta, Greg never let on to him or us that, in fact, he and his son had in fact failed on previous attempts to do a one-day ascent to the summit, driven back down off the mountain by high-altitude sickness—a little datum that we were left to infer from some tired words of satisfaction and congratulation between the two of them.

My final unmet expectation came at dinner. After all the effort and the undeniable triumph for those who summited, it felt more like a wake than a victory celebration. We sat like a still-life portrait, Zombies at Table. Maybe somebody offered a toast, but I can’t recall it, and it probably didn’t happen. Nobody could muster the energy for any conversation at dinner. Heads hung forward, eyes glazed. Orders were placed, plates came, forks aimlessly toyed with food, glasses were lifted slowly and deliberately toward lips, then set almost delicately on the table. One by one, people drifted away toward their rooms.

Alison and Jad and I slept deeply. When we arose late in the morning, the others were all gone. Not a word. Not a note. Nothing to suggest that we had all done something special together. It was more as though we had all done something wrong together. Very strange. To this day, I don’t understand it.

Later in the day, we made our way to the outfitters shop to return the crampons and ice axes we had rented there two days before. The rental counter was staffed by a young buck and his colleague who was just out of sight stocking the racks of equipment. After we turned in our gear and strolled around the shop looking for something to bring back as a gift for Patti, I overheard the young man hidden back in the equipment racks call out to his buddy at the counter, “Did you hear about those old guys did the mountain yesterday? Some real old dudes summited in one day! Can you imagine that?”

I thought that was pretty impressive. How old were they, I wondered. We were all the way outside, getting into the car, before it dawned on me that we were the only ones anywhere near the summit yesterday. He was talking about us.

I was still impressed.

I was proud of us all. The old guys. The kids. Myself. I kept telling myself that having made it to the Summit Plateau was almost as good as having made it to the summit peak. Okay, so maybe I had failed in my ultimate goal, but that was alright. Heck, I got within a few hundred yards of that little spike of a peak across the plateau. Practically the same thing. I accepted the reality that I had really spent it all—could not possibly have gone another step—and that gave me all the comfort I needed.

Or so I thought.

It was two years later when Patti and Alison and I were having a quiet conversation about the experience when I felt it hit me. A surge of sadness, like a tiny wave of nausea, tugged me back down into the hard truth of it. I had labored through all that training in the stairwell, for so many sweaty hours and days and weeks and months, and I had labored in such agony, step by aching step, struggling for each breath, up that snowy mountain—and the truth was that I failed. I had not summited. And failing really hurt. That failure had been hurting me, deeply, for two years.

So I cried.

I LIKED FRED JUST THE WAY HE WAS. SO DID HE.

“El-i-ot, this is Fred,” the caller said in a measured cadence. I knew it was Fred, of course. Nobody else ever pronounced a person’s name so carefully and deliberately. Even if I didn’t recognize the mid-western almost-twang of Fred’s voice, the way he slowly produced all three syllables in ‘Eliot’ and then hung the collection in the air, as though to be admired, told me who was calling.

I responded, and he proceeded to ask some questions about Patti and our children—not the perfunctory inquiries that pass for social lubrication in most interchanges, but really seeking to know about them, as though he actually cared about the answers, even though he had met them but once.

That one occasion had been six months before, in the summer of 1969 when I had bundled our gang into the car for a drive from Princeton to Pittsburgh, where Fred lived. Pursuing my interest in the influence of television on children, I wanted to meet him and write an article about him and his remarkable new program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. Our weekend-long visit with him and his family had been a slice of heaven. We were clearly on the same wavelength, and that visit initiated a friendship between Fred and me that had begun to flower through regular telephone chats in the ensuing months.

Once he had satisfied his interest in the wellbeing of my family, he got down to business. “I’m wondering if you might be interested in joining with me in our work for children,” he said. “You know, we are only able to produce seventeen programs a year on our current budget and schedule, but I think that we might be about to get some find additional funding to expand that quite a bit. We would produce sixty-five new programs every year. But I’d need your help to do it. I’d need your help on the creative side, with the scripts, and also in managing the company.”

The call couldn’t have been more welcome or timely. After two years of college chaplaincy and three years of parish ministry, I had concluded that my gifts and yearnings were elsewhere—specifically, in pursuing my love of writing and my fascination with the way young children think and feel and grow. I had recently been actively strategizing how to make that transition. And then the phone rang, bearing an invitation to live out that aspiration in partnership with someone who I had come in only a matter of months to love and greatly admire.

So I said, “Yes.”

Someday someone will write the definitive biography of Fred Rogers, and that is certainly not my intent in this brief reflection. Neither do I want to write about my own modest role in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. Rather, I prefer to share some intimate glimpses of the most remarkable person I have ever known—Fred McFeely Rogers.

When Fred died, many eulogized him by referring to him as a saint. And he indeed embodied some saintly qualities, as is well known. But that kind of well-warranted appelation tends to obscure some of the factors that enabled him to do what he did, and to be who he was.

For starters, I regard him as a genius. I do not use the word carelessly. I have been blessed in my life to work with a number of truly brilliant people. People who consistently had breakthrough ideas as we grappled together with challenges in the world of business or the church or elsewhere. People who fairly bristled with spontaneous new ideas. People who stood old ideas on their head to discover astonishing new possibilities.

But brilliance and genius are two different qualities.

Fred was in the genius category, his life’s work a model of concinnity. Consider the disparate elements he seamlessly synergized in his life’s work: he possessed a profoundly original understanding of the inner life of a preschool child, coupled with with an equally profound understanding of how a non-familial adult could nurture the best possibilities inherent in that inner life, coupled with a wholly original notion of how that could be done through an electronic medium—television. He wove all three into a gift for children and their families that may well be the most original, most important use of television in its history.

For “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was never a “TV show”.

Rather, Fred used television like an illustrated phone call with an individual child.

To begin with, he was always speaking through the television to just one child, and one child only. None of this “all you boys and girls out there in TV-land” stuff. Fred was there to befriend each child as though there were only one child out there to befriend.

In keeping with this one-on-one relationship, he did not have viewer-age children on the set with him. He introduced his young viewer to many guests on the program over the years, but they were adults or older children who could offer something important to the viewer. They were never age-mate peers who might distract Fred from his commitment to be there, and to do everything, through the camera, one-on-one, exclusively for benefit of the single viewing child—or who might be seen by the viewer as a rival for Fred’s attention and affection.

What Fred established with the child was a true dialogue. Question, answer. Stimulus, response. Lead, follow. Perceive, react. He created an emotional and intellectual pas de deux with a preschooler that began in some worrisome place where Fred knew the child might be—say, anxious about being displaced in his or her parents’ affection by the newly arrived younger sibling. As the lead partner in the dance, Mister Rogers gently swept the two of them across the program stage together in a linked series of initiatives by him and exquisitely anticipated responses by the young viewer. Move, response, further move based on the anticipated response, another response, yet a further move… By the end of the twenty-eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds of each program, the child was in a different place, a better place. And still right beside Mister Rogers, who had gently brought him over there.

The key to Fred’s relationship with the child was, of course, the fact that he had such profound knowledge of, and empathy for, the inner life of preschool children. This knowledge was both firsthand, and acquired. His firsthand knowledge carried over from his own life as a preschooler who spent many, many hours by himself in isolation from other children. In the most sensational crime of the century to that date, the son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered in March, 1932—just days before the celebration of the third birthday of young Fred M. Rogers at the home of his wealthy parents in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The wave of panic that swept across the nation and terrified the well-to-do is almost beyond comprehension today, but suffice it to say that Fred is not the only child who was summarily put under lock and key.

Thus commenced an unintended period of isolation that, in retrospect, was probably critical to Fred’s development of his monumental imagination—and his legendary respect for the imagination and the inner life of the preschool child. Other geniuses—Albert Einstein comes immediately to mind—also “enjoyed” periods of almost total isolation when very young.

This inadvertent incubation period seems to be characteristic of many who later intuitively leapt across invisible boundaries into uncharted territory and established invaluable outposts there, luring the rest of us to follow as best we could. Roaming freely in the limitless realm of a child’s imagination, such geniuses-to-be apparently liberate themselves forever from the strictures of rational, categorical thinking that pre-structure and therefore delimit the possibilities for us ordinary mortals.

Fred also acquired sublime understanding of the inner life of children by seeking the wisdom of world-class experts in early childhood development. Chief among these was Margaret McFarland, the largely unsung heroine of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” who was Fred’s primary mentor in the psychology of preschool children.

The co-founder (with Benjamin Spock and Erik Erickson) of a child-study institute at the University of Pittsburgh, Margaret devoted her life to understanding preschool children’s inner life, and she shared her understanding with Fred and with me as we developed themes and scripts for the program. She led him and all of us into a profound appreciation for the dimly lit but richly textured inner life of a very young child, enabling us to see the delicate, intricate tapestry into which the dramas of early development are woven. I met with her weekly, as did Fred, and each time she led me on these voyages of quiet discovery I came away forever changed, forever in her debt, and forever in awe of the processes by which we emerge from childhood into the rest of our life.

For Fred, the child was someone to be cherished for his or her own sake. “I like you just the way you are” was his mantra, and viewers of all ages quietly yearned to hear those words and believe they were meant for them. Who wouldn’t want such affirmation?

Well, some parents actually didn’t want it for their children. I did most of the public speaking for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” when I worked with Fred, as this was (at that time, anyhow) something he wasn’t fond of. And in the Q&A after a talk, some parent would invariably say to me, “I really question the wisdom of telling a child you like them just the way they are. Won’t that make them lazy and rob them of their motivation?”

But I found that I could prompt most to re-think their concern by looking them squarely in the eye and saying very calmly, and very sincerely, “You know, I like you just the way you are.” Their puzzled look usually gave way to a shy smile, then a grin of recognition as they realized how good that felt—and realized that it produced a little wave of motivation to be even more of who they already were, and even more of who they could be. “Oh,” you could almost hear them think, “I get it.”

For Fred, it was always all about nurturing the best any individual has within them—within them, but oftentimes not yet fully realized. Not-fully-realized is obviously the case for preschoolers, whose development is still very rudimentary in comparison with what lies ahead for them in their youth, adulthood, and maturity.

In this regard, Fred was a pure exponent and practitioner of true “education”—the art best captured in the Latin root word “educere” which means “to draw out” or “to bring forth from within”.

This is the exact opposite of programs like “Sesame Street” which strive to inject something foreign from without. The preschool child’s natural learning agenda has all to do with intra- and inter-personal matters: learning to trust, learning one’s place in the family and community, learning how to control impulses and fears and speech, learning to lead and follow and cooperate, learning to employ their imagination and initiative. They need time and thinking-space to work on these critical lifelong understandings.

For generations, adults’ learning agenda for children was consistent with the child’s own agenda. But with the upsurge in recent decades of parental anxiety and societal anxiety about whether one’s own child or certain categories of others’ children would “succeed”, programs like Sesame Street came to the fore. Their well-meaning but misguided intent was to jump-start preschoolers by inculcating adult symbol skills—like numbers and alphabet—before the time when these children might naturally seek to acquire them. Relying on modern-day versions of old-fashioned teaching techniques such as rote-memorization, they tricked children into paying attention by adopting the dubiously admirable tactics of the TV product commercial.

While these tricks proved capable of seizing a child’s attention, there is less proof that they did anything worthwhile with that attention once secured. The much-touted research on the value of such programming does more to raise questions more than it does to provide satisfying answers. And it certainly doesn’t suggest that today’s children can’t and won’t do exactly as previous generations did—namely, learn to read when and as their natural curiosity is frustrated by an inability to comprehend what’s meant by written words they see. Motivated by the desire to understand that meaning, they can and will still proceed to acquire the decoding skills we call “reading”—when they are ready. Meanwhile, the hours spent in prematurely memorizing as-yet-irrelevant symbols might well be better spent in self-understanding and understanding the people and world about them.

Amidst all the qualities for which Fred has been properly acclaimed, there was one that remains relatively unremarked. I am referring to his power.

There were three questions I could always count on someone’s asking when I did public speaking about “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. One was about “I like you just as you are”, as discussed above. Another went like this: “Is Fred…uh, you know…ah…is he…” the questioner squirmed a bit, then brightened: “ I mean, does he have a family?” The oblique question about Fred’s sexual orientation was quickly settled when I described his wife and children.

The other one was “What’s Mister Rogers really like? Is he like that off screen, too? Doesn’t he ever get angry or throw a fit?” While I could honestly tell people that the Fred on the screen was the same Fred I knew when the camera was off, I also mentioned several factors that would not be obvious to a viewer.

One, and the least important, was that Fred cared passionately enough about the excellence of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to display frustration (but never overt anger) at something that didn’t measure up to his or our standards. But he never attacked or put down a person who was seemingly responsible for such lapses. He just made it very, very clear that something better was both possible and expected from that person in the future. That person deserved to do better for his or her own benefit, and the program needed it, too.

Some questioned why this more hard-edged dimension of Fred’s character was not on display in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. The answer was easy. Fred didn’t show anger or frustration on the program precisely for the reason that Fred was never angry or frustrated with that single viewing child with whom he was in dialogue during the program. There was simply no legitimate reason to show such emotions on the program, out of their real-life context, just to prove (to adults, because no child ever missed them) that they existed in his repertoire of feelings.

But the most important element of Fred that was not apparent to the viewer was his power. Fred was the single most powerful person I have ever known.

I say that as one who has had the pleasure of knowing and working and playing with quite a number of people whom the world considers powerful, including board members and CEOs of many famous corporations and organizations as well as household-name celebrities, politicians, and the like. They all had abundant amounts of power of one kind or another, but none ever had the kind of power that Fred had.

Fred had the power of self-possession.

Self-possession?

Fred owned himself completely, and neither you nor I owned any of him. Not a scintilla. He knew who he was, why he had been born, what he was working to create, what was his present and what was his future (more of the present, thank you), and what he thought of himself.

Fred Rogers liked himself just the way he was.

And what is more to the point, he didn’t care—actually, didn’t ever even think about—what you thought of him.

Think about that. Here is a man who is being engaged every day by millions of children (and their parents and often by college-age and retired people as well) who has no sense of “audience” whatsoever. It just never occurred to him to wonder what you might be thinking about him. He was just totally oblivious, totally uninterested.

It’s not that way for the rest of us. On any given day, somewhere between 1% and 99% of our mind is busy calculating how we’re coming across to our audience—the people whose approval we yearn for. Parents. Children. Spouses. In-laws. Bosses. Prospective Bosses. Friends. Associates. Passersby. Sales clerks, for God’s sake.

On a really good day, when we’re feeling okay about ourselves, the percentage is pretty small. On a bad day when we’re feeling sort of inadequate, it can be pretty dominant. Even as I write this, some (today, quite small—but still detectable) part of me is hoping you’ll think well of me when you read this. It’s that way for all of us.

Unless you are Fred Rogers. I swear, it was never a blip on his radar screen. Simply didn’t matter. Irrelevant. Wouldn’t change anything anyhow even if he did know, so why bother even thinking about it?

This is not to be confused with absence of ego. Fred had a healthy ego, of course, because everyone has an ego. The key word is “healthy”. He worked on making and keeping his ego healthy—not an automatic condition when one is widely adored—and he felt genuinely sorry for those whose unsatisfied egos impelled them to build mansions or make other outsized statements that seemed to cast doubt on the health of the ego’s owners. No, Fred’s lack of interest in what others thought of him was a combination of feeling just right about himself and wanting instead to spend all his energy, all the time, on knowing and supporting someone else’s yearning for fulfillment.

And that is power. Mesmerizing, jaw-dropping power. Stop-you-in-your-tracks, what-just-happened-here power. I have seen him enter a room and change the atmosphere in nanoseconds. Not because he was a celebrity. The same thing happened whenever he entered a roomful of other celebrities. No, Fred’s effect was different. His appearing in a room was more like the sudden manifestation of something holy in people’s midst. There was no big noisy “Hey! Look! There’s Mister Rogers!” Rather, it was more like a hush settling over people because they might miss something—some little nuance of word or gesture—from Fred. People would study him, follow him with their eyes and break away from the conversation they were in to drift along in his wake as he made his way through a crowd, as though something mystical might emanate from him, something they wanted to be touched by.

His focus on others, rather than caring about or exploiting their focus on him, led to his owning the room in other ways, too. It freed him from heeding conventional gestures of self-promotion in favor of treating every moment, every encounter, as an opportunity to enable others to get more closely in touch with what was most deeply meaningful to them.

Two examples of this will live forever in my mind. The first was in the mid-seventies. We had struggled for some years with the challenge of creating a program dealing with divorce. We knew that many of our young viewers were living with the effects of divorce—impending, current, or past—and that few experiences could equal its impact on them. We wanted to be helpful to them, but we knew it would be difficult at best and downright destructive at worst, if we didn’t get it right. To make matters worse, we knew we would be stirring up the specter of divorce among the millions of children who had not experienced it but whose own parents would certainly have displayed plenty of behavior that might lead the child to fear its happening to them.

So when we finally produced a week-long series of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” programs on the matter of divorce, we felt it incumbent upon us to alert parents to the fact that we were doing them and to prepare them for whatever issues or questions the programs might raise in their children. We decided to do this through a prime-time “special” for parents, and Fred took to the road to stimulate understanding and viewership of the special. (Normally, such apparent self-promotion was anathema to Fred, but the exceptional content of this program prompted his exceptional determination to ensure maximum understanding of the series.)

He made appearances on a number of talk shows and a few widely-viewed local news programs such as the hugely popular WNBC-TV “News 4 New York” in New York City co-hosted by Pia Lindstrom and Sue Simmons. When it came time for them to interview Fred, they lobbed him the typical softball question so he could knock it out of the park. “So, Fred, we understand you have a new special coming up on PBS next week. What can you tell us about it?”

At this point, the conventional thing—you’ve seen it a thousand times—is for the celebrity to launch into a lot of animated prattle about how excited they are about their new production and how much they adored working with their co-star and/or director, then transition into a tantalizing film clip as a teaser for the audience.

Not Fred. He observed quietly, almost sadly, “We have produced some programs about divorce. For a lot of people, divorce is an extremely painful experience with long-lasting effects.”

Lindstrom and Simmons smiled and nodded on cue. Then they were stunned by Fred’s direct question right back to them: “Have either of you ever been involved in divorce?”

Pia Lindstrom, the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, caught on right away that he was asking a serious question and expected a serious answer. So she gathered herself and responded first, noting that divorce had been a regrettable feature of her childhood and, in fact, of her own adult life. She noted that Fred was right about its having long-lasting effect, recounting candidly how even to that day, nine years after divorcing her ex-husband, she found herself mentally firing rejoinders at him.

When she came to the close of her moving response, Fred silently shifted his eyes to Sue Simmons. She swallowed hard and said she was in the midst of a divorce at that very moment, and that, true to Fred’s characterization, it was indeed the most painful experience she had ever had. She followed herself into the pain and spelled it out before eventually catching herself and realizing that she was supposed to be the interviewer, not the subject of the interview.

Too late to change roles. Fred deftly caught the ball in transition and closed the interview by simply noting, “Well, that is why we made these programs, and we hope they’ll be helpful to people”

That was it. Six or seven minutes of total air time. Fred’s share: thirty seconds, tops. It was all he needed.

Perhaps the most widely noted example of Fred’s seizing the moment in an uncoventional way was his acceptance “speech” when receiving an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1998. The bejeweled audience for this gala event was made up of the most successful and celebrated (and in some instances hard-nosed) luminaries in TV. When Fred was called to the stage and microphone to receive his award, he turned the moment into a gift for everyone in the auditorium.

He looked across the gathering and said, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are. Ten seconds of silence.”

There was a ripple of puzzlement for an instant, so he raised his wrist, conspicuously looked at his watch, and said, “I’ll watch the time.”

The tiny ripple of laughter faded quickly as members of the audience realized they were going to comply—they wanted to comply—with Fred’s suggestion. Then the audience, one by one, closed their eyes and moved into a sudden, intimate encounter with some precious person who had breathed life into them—who had enabled them to be in such an exalted moment as the Emmys—and their emotions flowed freely. In seconds, quiet weepings lurched into audible sobs, dampened eyes blinked fast and then spilled messy tears. A roomful of celebrities was deep in holy gratitude for having been loved enough to become, well, celebrities.

Fred lifted his eyes from his watch after a while and pronounced the benediction: “May God be with you.” And he returned to his seat.

His phenomenal power made all the more lamentable another plaint that audience members frequently brought to me after I had spoken somewhere. “Our daughter loves ‘Mister Roger’s Neighborhood’, and so does our son, but my husband won’t let our son watch it. He doesn’t think Mister Rogers is an appropriate male role model for our son.” That father should be so lucky, and his son should be so lucky—or blessed—as to have even the least portion of the manhood Fred Rogers displayed every day. (Of course, neither Fred nor I would have called it “manhood”. How about “humanity”.) If all men handled themselves, and the challenges and challengers they faced, the way Fred did, we’d have a lot sweeter world on our hands.

A good example of the “manly” dimension of his gentle power came to the fore in the way he handled a challenging situation that emerged in the world of business. Some years after I left “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, Burger King launched a new series of TV commercials directed at children. They featured a Mister-Rogers lookalike as the hamburger pitchman. Now, when I say “lookalike”, that doesn’t begin to do it justice. This actor looked, moved, talked, probably smelled exactly like Fred Rogers. The first time I saw it, I actually thought it was Fred. I knew he would never have knowingly or willing have taken on that role, so I figured they must have found some nefarious way to lift footage from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and dub bits and pieces of his voice to make it come out to say what they wanted. They had somehow created a perfect likeness.

This impersonator was in fact so perfect that no child would have ever known it was not the real Mister Rogers.

And that’s why Fred had to move into action, and fast. Bad enough that he would never, ever treat his viewers as a target for commercial exploitation. Bad enough that he would never sell his celebrity and goodwill to promote anyone’s product. Bad enough that millions of children would think that Mister Rogers was now out to get money from them. But hamburgers? Hamburgers? Hamburgers?!

Fred was a vegetarian.

So he called me up and asked what I thought he should do about it. By coincidence, although he didn’t know it at the time of his call, I had done some consulting work with J. Walter Thompson, Burger King’s ad agency and, in fact, had helped them win the account some years before. So I suggested that he give me a few minutes to look into it and get back to him.

Later that day, Fred called the man who was then president of Burger King and got him on the phone. After introducing himself, Fred asked him if he was a father. He was, and in fact had young children who had enjoyed “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. Fred asked him if his children understood what he did for a living. They don’t know the specifics too well, the man replied, they just know I go to an office and that we make Burger King hamburgers. They see our stores all over and they know I run the company.

What would it be like for you, Fred mused, if your children misunderstood the nature of your work. If they thought you did something you didn’t believe in. If they thought you did something they might not believe in, either?

The call ended cordially a few minutes later, with never a mention of the commercials. The call about the commercials came seconds after the conversation with Fred, and it came from the president of Burger King to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “Get those ‘Mister Rogers’ commercials off the air instantly, don’t ever show them again, and destroy the tapes!”

Fred wasn’t exactly perfect, of course. Who is? But the tiny handful of less-than-flattering moments I observed over many years (or the ones that his wife JoAnn and sons James and John have surely observed over a lifetime) only serve to highlight how extraordinarily he lived all the myriad other moments of his life.

Of course, he got some help from King Friday XIII. Fred created, manipulated, and provided the voices for almost all the puppets on The Neighborhood of Make-Believe portion of “Mister Rogers’ Neinhborhood”, including the King. King Friday XIII ruled The Neighborhood of Make-Believe with imperious ego, gleefully oblivious to the needs and feelings of others unless someone drew his attention to them. He was, in other words, the exact opposite of Fred, providing Fred a daily opportuity to act just as badly as he could possibly imagine—bossy, demanding, unfeeling, impetuous, even clueless. Pretty good alter-ego therapy, I’d say. (Over time, as the King married and became a father, he softened and became a more well-developed “person”. I have sometimes wondered if that paralleled a lessening of Fred’s need for an outlet for whatever “demons” the King had expressed and exorcised for him in previous years.)

The real-life Fred had an amazing capacity for sensing discomfort in a person and going straight to it, with a word or gesture that just plain took it away. He was drawn to all kinds of human struggle, whether that might be dealing with a disabling handicap, a grievous loss, a humiliating failure, or just something relatively trivial but troubling. My wife Patti can tell you about the last kind.

Some years before when she and I lived in Middlebury, Vermont, I happened by a farmhouse auction on a stiflingly hot day in August and came away, as the only bidder, with an antique raccoon coat for her. I thought it would be just the thing for keeping her warm and cozy at frigid football games that fall.

Well, Patti’s abiding love for all creatures great and small is rooted deep in her childhood and has continued unabated into adulthood, and so she was always caught in a bind when deciding whether to wear it. She didn’t want to reject my gift, but she hated the notion that anyone might regard her as a wearer of furs taken from animals killed for her sartorial delight.

Fred settled that quandary that for her.

One very snowy night in Pittsburgh, Fred, Joanne, Patti and I trudged along the sidewalk headed for a restaurant, Patti snugly wrapped inside her raccoon cocoon. Fred remarked approvingly about the coat, triggering Patti’s oft-repeated, self-conscious little apology about its being an antique from the 1920s that Eliot had bought for her and her disclaimer about killing-animals-for-furs.

Fred mused aloud in his slow-paced, deliberate way, “Hmmm, well, I wonder what the life expectancy is for raccoons. Have any idea?” Patti opined that she thought it was maybe fifteen or twenty years.

“Well, in that case, look at it this way: they’d have all been dead by now anyhow. I think you should just enjoy that coat, Patti.” And so she did.

As his playful behavior in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe revealed, Fred had a silly side—a very substantial silly side—that he freely exercised in real life, although King Friday XIII showed up there, too. I don’t know how we fell into this routine, but for thirty years the King and I exchanged highly mannered birthday greetings. In keeping with his kingly status, however, the king got more greetings than I did. He rigged the game. You see, King Friday XIII’s birthday was, naturally, on every Friday the thirteenth. There is at least one such Friday every year and—here’s the rub—more than one in many years. That figures. Why shouldn’t a self-important king have more birthdays than us commoners.

So every Friday the thirteenth for more than thirty years, I placed a call to Fred’s office, asked his wonderful assistant Elaine if I might please speak to the king, and was subsequently put through on Fred’s private line. He always answered in character, stuffy and grand and grandiloquent, with the same formal line: “This is His Royal Majesty King Friday the Thirteenth speaking. Who calls?”

I always replied precisely, “This is your humble and grateful subject Eliot calling to wish you glorious felicitations on your natal day, Your Highness.”

From there, we would devolve into some nonsense conversation for a couple of minutes—with Fred always in character as King Friday XIII. The King would then diligently obtain Daley family news which he promised to pass along to Mister Rogers the next time he saw him, and then would catch me up on Rogers family goings-on which he or his subjects had had occasion to observe recently.

Once well established, this birthday-greetings ritual became a solemn obligation for both the King and myself. Come whichever birthday was to be acknowledged, the caller would track down the honoree wherever on the face of the earth he happened to be on that day. I have reached the King on a boat off Galveston, Texas, and he reached me in the rural precincts of Ireland. To fail to connect would have been unthinkable, and we exchanged scores of calls over some thirty years.

But in November of 2002, my birthday passed without a call from the King. I knew something must be wrong. As it turned out, that was when Fred was learning about the stomach cancer that was to take his life several months later. When I heard about it, I was confused. I always figured Fred would live to be a hundred or more. After all, he took supremely good care of himself, with a super-healthy vegetarian diet and a highly disciplined regimen of swimming every single noon hour, no matter where in the world he was. For him to die in his seventies just wasn’t what I had in mind.

I was kept abreast of his deteriorating condition, and so his death one late February day was not a surprise. What did surprise me was my own reaction to his death: I was not swept away with grief. To the contrary, I took the news in an almost matter-of-fact way, and I simply couldn’t get in touch with any of the deep pain one might expect at losing a friend, mentor, and companion who had been unspeakably precious in my life.

What was going on? I was so struck by my lack of grief that I took a time-out to plumb my inner feelings to find out why I felt such equanimity at his dying. What could account for that?

I found the answer that I was looking for: I knew Fred’s life was complete.

It took me a few minutes to tease out the significance of that answer. I gradually realized that my grief at the loss of people I have cared about has typically been in proportion to my (admittedly judgmental) sense of how much life they left unlived. My most wracking grief, I now saw, had been at the deaths of those who never dared to dream, or were trapped in a bad marriage, or who stayed stuck in the same dead-end job forever, or died very young, or in other ways had not engaged in the fullness of life and relationships that it seemed they might have.

But Fred’s life was complete. His life’s work, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, was complete, and it would become what we always intended—the TV equivalent of classic children’s literature, to be enjoyed by generation after generation of young viewers. Our effort to eliminate from the program anything that would date it, that would tie it to a particular time-period, had been remarkably successful, and now the third generation of viewers will shortly pass it along to their children—the fourth generation.

His personal relationships were complete. His every encounter with another person, no matter how fleeting, was an opportunity for Fred to impart a blessing of attention and affirmation on the other. He rarely failed to part from another person without leaving them feeling better about themselves.

Public understanding of his purpose and place in American life was complete. His unique persona was now widely recognized and appreciated. The outpouring of affection that overwhelmed the country and flooded the media at the news of his death made it abundantly clear that people now truly understood the man and his mission. Their gratitude for his presence in their lives was monumental.

And his spiritual life was complete. Fred was related to the mysterious presence of God in effable ways. God’s presence was not theoretical for Fred. God was present to Fred every day, and he both took God’s presence for granted and drew upon it gratefully. The deep serenity of Fred Rogers reflected the depth of his grounding in the Spirit. Fred not only knew who he was and liked himself just the way he was. He knew Whose he was, and liked that a lot, too.

It is tempting to end this reflection cleverly by returning to Fred his very own words to the Emmy audience: “May God be with you”.

But given what I know about him, that somehow feels redundant.

Mid-Course Corrections Matter Most of All

INERTIAL GUIDANCE SYSTEMS ARE NOT JUST FOR SPACE SHIPS

When somebody has a big ambition, they sometimes boast that they are “going for broke”. This particular phrase has never held much appeal for me, as “broke” is not a place I’ve ever wanted to wind up. Oh, I understand of course that they’re speaking about taking a big risk in order to seek a big gain, and that “broke” is only one of two possible outcomes. They’re saying that they’re willing to “bet the farm” in order to pursue the chance of success despite the risk of going broke. I get it, but I still don’t like the phrase.

One holiday our family was sitting around the fireplace bantering about one thing and another when someone suggested that we come up with a metaphor for each of us. Everybody pitched in. One daughter wound up being characterized as a dolphin, for her brains and her ability to live simultaneously in dual environments—body in the water, but taking oxygen from the air above the water. Our son who is a so-called “endurance athlete” (the kind who do the Ironman Triathlon) was seen as a Ferrari, an exquisitely tuned, widely admired, high-performance machine that takes seriously attentive maintenance.

For me? They settled on “bungee jumper”—somebody who jumps off high places when he doesn’t have to, plummeting toward seeming disaster, only to rebound with a massive “sproing!” and come up laughing.

I like risks, but the truth is that I’ve never taken one that I thought had any possibility at all of leaving me broke. Some almost have, of course, but I didn’t entertain that idea at the time I took the risk. I’ve always trusted that I could and would rebound, almost no matter what.

That must be why I prefer the term “shoot the moon” when going for something big. For millenia, the moon was the principal symbol for something unattainable. “He’s asking for the moon here.” Big stretch, with no hope of success.

Then came JFK with his pledge—incredible though it sounded at the moment—to put a man on the moon within a decade. Given that almost none of the requisite underlying science to accomplish this feat had been done as of that speech in August of 1961, many applauded the bravado of the vision but predicted that the goal would be quietly laid to rest once the intial flurry of bedazzlement subsided and the insurmoutable obstacles came into focus. Few appreciated what JFK knew: monumental breakthroughs are possible with monumental determination and resources. Less than a decade later—in fact, only seven years and eleven months later, on July 20, 1969—Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. (Would that our contemporary political leaders had the courage to commit to such a breakthrough in alternative, renewable sources of energy, among other seemingly intractable challenges.)

So now “shoot the moon” still means to go for it big, but without the undertow of inevitable futility. You really can shoot the moon and actually reach the moon, in traveling to outer space and, as I have learned, in building a business.

But not, as it turns out, by aiming straight at your target.

Huh?

No, aiming straight at a target and expecting to stay steadily on one course until you get there turns out to be a pretty low-percentage play. Better to launch in the general direction of your target and then plan on a series of mid-course corrections which become increasingly finely calibrated, based on what you learn along the way.

In space travel, they call this an “inertial guidance system”, and the concept works equally well for earth-bound ambitions.

An inertial guidance system consists of two main elements:

One element is a gyroscope, not all that different from the kind we got at the hobby shop as kids and amazed ourselves by balancing them on a string. Nowadays, of course, the mechanical gyros we played with are supplemented by hi-tech ring laser gyros and fiber optic gyros, but the principle is the same: you need some way to monitor and maintain balance.

The other key element is an accelerometer, to measure linear motion, or speed. When the data from the accelerometer is fused with the data from the gyroscope and compared with the location of the target, it produces a navigational reading that tells the operator to turn a smidgen to the left or the right, and whether to giddy up or ease off.

The key to inertial guidance is that it happens constantly. In other words, what may have appeared to be a relatively direct path for Apollo 11 from earth to the moon was in reality a nearly infinite number of mid-course corrections. At the Kennedy Space Center, NASA got it headed in the right general direction on July 16, 1969, but all the conditions the spacecraft encountered during the next four days en route to the moon were detected by the gyro and the accelerometer in order to determine what adjustment was required right at that instant—and the next instant, and the next instant, and the instant after that.

It’s just same thing in building a business. When Mitch and I began our company together, we had only one goal: to work together. That was it. Hard to believe, perhaps, but true. Mitch and his family pulled up firmly rooted stakes in Chicago and moved to Princeton on nothing more than the confidence that a fusion of our brains would produce something interesting and maybe even profitable. (Their brave move was perhaps a bit closer to “going for broke” at the time.)

We honestly did not have the foggiest idea of what we were going to do. All we had going for us was a couple of years’ working together on a board that met quarterly, plus enough after-dinner, hours-long phone calls between Princeton and Chicago that our wives began to mutter about our lack of attention to them. Every time we got our heads together in person or on the phone, we excitedly re-invented the world. Eventually, we promised ourselves that some day, somehow, somewhere, we would work together as partners.

When Mitch and his family arrived in Princeton and got settled, our second order of business—after taking some office space—was to sit down and figure out what we wanted to do. We knew that we wanted to deliberately meld our minds, because our history together to date had shown that fusion to be both exhilarating and productive.

So we began by spending all our work time together—close together. Even though we had taken a suite of offices suitable for an eventual staff of six or eight in that location, Mitch and I sat in the same room facing each other over a single antique double “partners’ desk” where we saw and heard everything the other did, joined together on all outgoing or incoming phone calls, and never went to a meeting without the other. We were determined to become one unified thinking machine together. Our behavior must have struck others as pretty inefficient and redundant, but we knew what we were doing and why.

But what, exactly, were we going to do?

To provide us with some structure and process to identify what we might pursue together, we turned to the perennial best-seller “What Color Is Your Parachute?”. Richard Bolles’ classic guide to job-hunting is designed to help an individual take inventory of his or her passions, assets, limitations, and aspirations to chart a course to their future. But we used it differently. We went through the exercises as though we were one unified, undifferentiated individual, composing from our common factors a profile of the “person” whose future we were planning.

When the dust settled on that exercise, we realized that our highest-priority was children. Both as fathers and professionals, we had a powerful commitment to bringing what we immodestly took to be our enlightened and creative thinking to the products, services, and communications that children are exposed day in and day out.

We started working our networks of contacts, scratching around for anything that would get us started, and in due course we turned up a few consulting assignments. Not the kind that change the world for the better, to be sure, but they seemed harmless and, hey, you have to start somewhere. Even though we had both abandoned pretty good incomes from our previous work, the bank still expected us to make our monthly mortgage payments. They’re funny that way. And so at the behest of McDonald’s advertising agency we came up with a strategy for the evolution of Ronald McDonald, and for Topps we came up with a couple of dozen concepts for novel twists on chewing gum. (Please don’t ask me to elaborate. It’s too embarrassing.)

Inertial guidance nudge #1: Uh, this isn’t exactly a direction we want to continue in, is it? Gyroscopic tweak to the north. Sixteen miles north of Princeton, to be exact, to New Brunswick, New Jersey—home of Johnson & Johnson.

Some years before, I had secured a multi-million dollar underwriting of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” from Johnson & Johnson Baby Products Company. I was still in touch with the senior executives there, and we sat down to talk. In short order, they asked Mitch and me to help them think through some new products they were developing for babies and children. Then they asked us to develop a program of continuing medical education for pediatricians, to enhance their sensitivity to the needs of children and their parents.

Then to create a corporate re-positioning around the importance of human touch in stimulating both the will to thrive in infants and the parental instinct itself. Then to produce a film for expectant parents on the same matter.

Then to come up with an innovative program for addressing the rampant problem of inadequate prenatal care for single teenage mothers-to-be. And on, and on, and on. We were rolling, and we loved the kinds of assignments we were working on.

Intertial guidance nudge #2: Hey, it looks like we’re in the heath care business, doesn’t it? Aren’t we? Maybe we ought to work on developing more engagements in this field. Gyroscopic tweak laterally, into the rest of the corporation. (Oh, and while we’re at it, perhaps we ought to shelve the name “Childview” and just put our own names on the firm.)

If you want be in the healthcare business, J&J is a pretty darned good place to plant your flag. With scores and scores of semi-autonomous operating companies offering a stunning array of health-related products, they have long been the largest health care corporation in the world. Our satisfied clients at J&J’s Baby Products Company were only too happy to recommend us to their counterparts in other divisions of J&J, and soon we were up to our eyeballs in work on everything from the re-launch of one of their oldest, most low-tech products—the original backplaster—to a sweeping overhaul and realignment of their system of selling and distributing products to hospitals, which were rapidly consolidating their purchasing patterns through large affiliate groups designed to increase their negotiating leverage against companies like J&J. We were rolling even faster, and it all felt great.

Inertial guidance nudge #3: Whomp! What was that? Felt like we hit something. Look at the wobble on that gyroscope! I think it has knocked us off course! Should we go along on the new direction for a bit to see what lies in that direction?

It was the heavy hand of Sears knocking on our door, and it shook our whole building. “We understand from the people at J&J that you guys are pretty good strategic thinkers and businessmen,” they began. “We’ve decided to get into the healthcare business ourselves. So we’d like to buy your company, so you can create our diversification strategy to get into healthcare—we want to be a five billion dollar player within three-to-five years—and then have you become leaders of the new healthcare division you have created.”

Lights started flashing all around—green lights, yellow lights, red lights, all blazing away at once. Green, like in money. Yellow, like in what the hell would Sears do in health care. Red, like in we’d never ever sell our little company and get lost in some monstrous corporation—we’re having way too much fun in our own little boutique here in Princeton.

But, boy, wouldn’t that be a terrific project to tackle?

The people at Sears made it pretty attractive: take a clean piece of paper, look not just within the U.S. but all around the world, and come up with a plan that will make us huge in a hurry. We’ll provide you with whatever support you need to get the job done.

The timing was particularly tempting, our having just completed a couple of major assignments for J&J and the next projects under discussion were not yet under contract. We could easily back away from them for a little while to do the Sears gig.

Okay, we said. We won’t sell you our company, but we’ll put it in mothballs and give you a year-long, exclusive personal-services agreement. That should be enough time to get the strategy in place. As for joining the eventual Sears healthcare division that would be created, let’s hold that in abeyance until you and we see what it looks like at that time.

We were assigned to work out of the newly-formed Sears World Trade unit based in Washington, D.C. (they had big global ambitions at the time), and Sears leased a townhouse for us in Georgetown so we could be in residence there for a few days each week. (The tale of what transpired in that next year is told in “Blowing It”, elsewhere in this book.) After a year, our work there was done and we were ready to resume our Princeton-based professional life.

Inertial guidance nudge #4: Our gyroscopic balance was fine, but we needed a fresh rocket booster to re-launch the firm. The accelerometer had shown lots of velocity in Washington, D.C., but none in Princeton. What next?

We could always rev up the strategic consulting work at J&J, and we did in fact take on a couple of immediate assignments to ensure continuing revenues. But neither of us wanted to simply reinvent our own wheel from years past. We had always reveled in pushing ourselves to some new “cutting edge”, and so we scanned the horizon for fresh challenges. Our sights fell on the frozen flatlands of southeastern Minnesota. Rochester, to be exact.

Mayo Clinic is perhaps the best-known and most-respected medical facility around the world. Deservedly so, in my estimation. Over a hundred years ago, the Mayo brothers forged a medical team dedicated to the proposition that two heads were better than one, and three better than two—especially when dealing with matters like a medical diagnosis and treatment plan, where a person’s very life might be at stake. They fashioned a style of multi-specialty group practice of medicine that ensured a rich array of expert perspectives would be brought to bear on a patient’s condition before any definitive conclusions were reached or procedures initiated.

They had perfected interdisciplinary practice and created a corporate culture carefully designed to support this kind of ego-free, collaborative, non-profit, modestly compensated practice of medicine. But suddenly they were confronting a world in which newly created for-profit hospital chains were aggressively competing for patients and threatening to erode Mayo’s base of business. As the Mayo Board of Governors considered various means of coping with this threat, they asked us to help them think through their alternatives and make some decisions about Mayo Clinic’s strategy for the future.

So, now we were consultants to what is known as the “provider” side of healthcare. The work we did at Mayo, which involved the creation of additional Mayo Clinics in Scottsdale and Jacksonville, was well received, and a flagship client was born. Other engagements with large academic medical centers followed, as well as eventual work with chains of non-profit hospitals around the country where the situations were strung together like so many beads on a necklace. We happily staffed up to handle the flow of work, and the firm settled into a new course that was to last for almost five years before another nudge was required.

But in the first seven or eight years, we had taken our firm through four major mid-course corrections, and we knew for certain that the alternative—dogged pursuit of Childview, resisting the natural evolution we followed—would have deprived us of the enormous gratification we got from taking carom shots off the guard rails our inertial guidance system lit up.

Sometimes I compose little aphorisms to sum up a realization. One of them is this: When you’re through changing, you’re through.

THE NIGHT IT ALMOST ENDED

June 5, 1968.

4:00AM.

When the phone rings at 4AM, you know it’s not good news. In the few seconds it took me to untangle myself from the bedding and grope my way across the room to where the phone was ringing, my muddy mind was also groping: What terrible thing has happened? Surprising how many gruesome scenarios can form even in a muddled, half-asleep brain during a fifteen- or twenty-second lurch across a darkened bedroom.

“Day wakd body! Oh, God, day wakd body!”, I thought the caller was yelling. The voice was strangled and strange—no one I recognized. Was it a man? A woman? Hard to tell. Horror and hysteria were braided into a garbled wail of death, and the caller repeated it again, louder. “Day wakd body!!”

I overrode my initial instinct to hang up on this intruder who was surely a drunken nut who’d dialed my number by accident. “Who is this?” I inquired.

“It’s me!” the voice shrieked indignantly.

Jesus. Now I could tell. It was my mother.

“Mom! Oh, Mom! What’s going on?!” I blurted.

Now I could make out her words.

“They whacked Bobby,” she repeated once again, now almost calmly, in grim resignation. “They whacked him.”

Oh, my God. What happened?

“They got him at the hotel, the Ambassador, where the celebration was.”

Were you there?

“No, I stayed up here with my people, for our own celebration.”

Mom, an old Democratic party “pol”, had managed the volunteer activity for Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary campaign in California, and he had won that evening a stunning victory largely on the strength of an overwhelming majority vote in Northern California—Mom’s territory, and in large part, Mom’s doing. His dramatic victory was sizzling with promise of a dramatic, unstoppable run straight into the White House and, in her considered judgment, one of the greatest presidencies in U.S. history.

“Shot him down as he was leaving. Inside job. Don’t know who the hit man was.” Her tone plummeted south. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter,” she droned along, now suddenly listless, defeated. “It’s all over.” Her voice drifted off.

She was crushed. Absolutely crushed.

This woman had suffered too much loss that drove deep into her heart in recent years. My father’s death in 1966 was devastating, of course, but it had been coming for nearly twenty years since he suffered his first heart attack in his early 40s, and others followed. She had dreaded his dying too young, but she had seen it coming and, in the ways no one can ever explain, had prepared for it. Anticipatory grief on the installment plan. Expedient exploitation of the time that does remain, the days that are given before the inevitable happens. When his partners at the architectural firm called to say he had died suddenly at his desk, she was as ready as a spouse can be.

But the entire decade of the 1960s had already been full of earth-shaking loss for her. No one is ever ready for the assassination of a sitting President, especially one so charmed and charming as Bobby’s brother John F. Kennedy—and especially not for one who was on a first-name basis. Mom had worked for JFK’s nomination and was a JFK delegate to the national convention. She had worked in his campaign, and had been thrilled when he took office. Mom well knew his limitations and his horny proclivities—she had been sizing up political horseflesh for a long, long time by then—but she knew he would bring a new spirit to the country, a fresh perspective the baggy-faced old Washington regulars sorely lacked. She was full of hope for what he might accomplish, and then he was suddenly gone in a splatter of blood and bone on the streets of Dallas. Bang! Bang! He’s gone.

Mom had been a fierce champion of civil liberties and civil rights her entire life, and she saw in controversial black leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., a very necessary breaking away from the grinding pace (“with all deliberate speed”) by which legislation was dismantling racism. She knew that hearts needed to changed more than laws needed updating, and so the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 felt like a personal setback in her quest for social justice and social harmony. So, too, the loss of other prominent black leaders in the mid-sixties. Bang! Bang! Bang! They were all gone.

Then came Memphis, and the tragic murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April of 1968. The loss of King was a body blow to the creation of a just and truly civil society, because he was more than a champion of the downtrodden black. King uniquely understood something that few if any other leaders of the era understood: namely, that the white person’s need of healing from his or her racism was as deep as the black person’s need for emancipation from the effects of that racism. He knew that we whites were less-than-whole, less-than-what-God-intended, to the extent that we were as yet incapable of seeing our black brothers and sisters as members of our own family—and seeing ourselves as members of their family. We needed healing in order to fulfill our own best possibilities. In his paradoxical, inspired view, the benefits for black people were almost a by-product of the benefits we would attain as we evolved beyond our racism.

Bang! He was gone, too.

Now, a scant two months later, Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots from Sirhan Sirhan’s .22 caliber pistol, and Bobby is dying of the floor amidst a clatter of pots and pans in a lousy hotel kitchen, for God’s sake.

To hell with it, she thought. What’s the use.

The phone call didn’t end so much as it just petered out. We did our best to comfort her over the line, from three thousand miles away, but Mom just mumbled a few unmemorable ramblings and drifted off the phone. I knew my brothers who lived near her would be with her soon, but I knew that even their presence would not be enough to restore her spirit. She was just simply, absolutely, utterly crushed.

Some people who have been crushed stay crushed, like a soda can that’s been stepped on. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mom would stay flattened or, like a plant that has been crushed by a stray footfall, draw on some inherent instinct to re-knit, regain an inner will to thrive, find some nourishment, and recover a measure of vitality.

Which was she would go was not entirely predictable from her background. The clan she was born into were “proper Bostonians” of the first water—exceptionally cultured and supremely well educated. They were multi-lingual, mastered the classics and history and philosophy well before college, composed and played music, wrote and savored poetry, published a French-language newspaper, went to Harvard (all the men) or Middlebury (all the women) for generations, and lived extraordinarily rich lives of the mind. The intellectual fencing at their dinner table was truly exhilarating to behold.

But they also had their share of nervous breakdowns and alcoholics and wheel-spinners and confused souls and infidelities and maybe even a little incest here or there. Some of them crumbled and broke. Others died early of the variety of things people died from in the early 20th century, like coal-gas poisoning and mismanged infections. None ever made any “real money”, choosing instead careers as college professors, school superintendents, public servants and diplomats abroad. There was a kind of wistfulness about the clan that my brothers and I picked up on even as very young children during holiday gatherings as we sat cross-legged in our very proper Eton suits, observing the grown-ups from our to-be-seen-but-not-heard stations in window seats and on staircases at holiday gatherings in my grandparents’ big house.

Over time, we came to recognize that Mom was certainly the toughest, most resilient, one among her siblings, but I could not immediately tell whether this tidal wave of loss was going to sweep her under and drown her or not. For many months, the outcome was shrouded in doubt, compounded by my being a continent away from her and reduced to a few phone calls in which I tried ineffectually to nurture, and to assess, her recovery. I would just have to hope and wait and see.

“Well,” she started one such conversation nearly a year after Bobby’s assassination, “I’m thinking about the balance of power in San Francisco politics.”

And?

“We’ve got a gay community here in San Francisco that’s huge, intelligent, on the right side of all the issues—and totally disorganized. They have next-to-no influence in political affairs right now, but you know what? If they ever got their act together, they could swing every election in this town.”

So?

“I’m going to organize them.”

And so she did. Eschewing any further involvement in the national political scene that had left her so devastated, she went local. Over the next decade, “Nan” Daley led the formation of any number of gay Democratic clubs throughout San Francisco and coached them on how to use their voting bloc to gain sway over matters that were of particular concern to them, and matters that affected the well-being of the larger populace. A master strategist and parliamentarian, she could almost always find a way to outwit the troglodytes who opposed a communal embrace of the whole human family. In time, gay candidates stood for and won elective office in San Francisco, and the city became a place where gay and lesbian life attained a measure of normalcy—notwithstanding the horrific City Hall murder of openly gay S.F. Supervisor Harvey Milk and his ally Mayor George Moscone in 1978.

Ever the broad-gauge civil libertarian—emphasis on “libertarian”—Mom was also a co-founder during that time of the C.O.Y.O.T.E organization. The group, flying under the acronym for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics”, worked diligently to attain respect, protection, and legality for prostitutes and other sex workers.

Mom’s mid-course corrections were not over yet, though. Gradually, inevitably, she eased back into active involvement in support of California Democrats who sought and attained national prominence—Speaker of the House-to-be Nancy Pelosi, S.F. Mayor soon-to-be Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Congresswoman soon-to-be Senator Barbara Boxer being among the many who spoke in gratitude during the two-and-a-half-hour memorial service for Mom when she died in 1991.

It is worth noting that she did all this in her “spare” time, after putting in a 40-hour week as Director of the Victim and Witness Assistance Program for San Francisco where she spent her seventies and early eighties leading a 35-person staff of professionals who helped those involved in crimes to recover from their traumatic experiences. Not the seventies and eighties. Her seventies and eighties. She retired from this position at age 83, when she suffered the stroke that soon ended her life.

All in all, quite a life.

Mom expected a lot from herself, and she expected a lot from me, too—something she never let me forget. Give the possibility that Mom can in fact look down from her perch in heaven to keep tabs on my own doings, you can be sure I’m not going to spend my own seventies and eighties just playing golf.

DE-FANGING THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.

When I had been at “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, we raised money to produce the program from corporations and the government and, occasionally, from private philanthropic foundations. That was a big part of my job as president, and so I got to know this territory pretty well—especially the corporate and private sources. And I was struck by two things: first, how relatively easy it was to get the dough, and second, how little thought the donors gave to their own strategy in the use of these precious dollars. For the most part, their grants seemed to be on-the-spot, up-or-down decisions in response to an unsolicited proposal that came their way, rather than a decision designed to help fulfill a carefully wrought plan on their part to bring about a specified improvement in society.

And for the most part, especially among the private foundations, the work seemed to be carried out through a just a handful of casual meetings a year when the trustees would sift through the piles of incoming appeals, name their own favorites, distribute the money, have a nice lunch, and go home. There were at the time (1976) about 12,000 philanthropic foundations in the U.S., but fewer than 1,000 professionals at work within them—and these professionals were largely employed by the forty largest foundations. Most of the work elsewhere was being done on the back of an envelope.

To my entrepreneurial eye, this looked like a no-brainer: these other, unstaffed foundations need professional staff, so I’ll put together a professional foundation staff for rent. We’ll be the first consulting group in the U.S. whose sole purpose is to help the trustees of these unstaffed private foundations plan and execute their philanthropic strategy. Brilliant!

Before I leapt, I thought it might be wise to consult with someone who knew the territory. Robert Goheen had recently followed up his distinguished tenure as president of Princeton University with a new job as head of the Council on Foundations, a philanthropic “trade group”. I called on him.

“Forget about it,” he said.

Well, that was hardly the advice or encouragement I was looking for. Beg your pardon, Dr. Goheen?

“These people are very self-satisfied,” he explained. “All they want are congratulations, plaques, and dinners in their honor.”

But, but, I protested, what about their seemingly non-existent strategies, about increasing their efficacy, about—in words of one syllable—getting more bang for the buck?

“They don’t care about that,” he replied. “Look, it’s very easy to be successful at this game. The I.R.S. says that you must distribute to qualified 501 (c) 3 organizations an amount equal to 5% of your assets, or equal to all of your investment income—whichever is greater—minus reasonable administrative expenses. How hard can that be?”

Well, clearly that was a mistake.

Not my brilliant idea for the company. Going to see Goheen. I mean, what could he know, anyhow? Probably has a warped view because of something traumatic that happened to him as a child. Surely it can’t be that my idea for the business is fatally flawed. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Let’s start the company!

Well, there is something to be said for taking action, even (sometimes) wrong-headed action. When I was a seminary student, Dr. Esler was my professor who taught us how to write sermons. One day he said, “You know, there will be days when you will sit down to write a sermon, and both the paper and your mind will be absolutely blank. You won’t have the foggiest idea of what to say, not the first notion. Well, today, I want you to give you Esler’s Rule: ‘Begin anyway!’ After all, if you have something, you can always improve it. But if you have nothing, you have, well, nothing.”

Esler’s Rule has proved to be one of the most important, all-purpose mantras I have ever learned. Not just for sermons—for everything. Especially for business. Way more important, and more valid, than “Find a need and meet it”, but I’ll address that one elsewhere.

Months later, the business—Foundation Managers, Inc.—was ensconced in spiffy offices in Princeton and a staff of professionals was in place. We were exceptionally well funded as the subsidiary of an investment-banking firm and indulged in an extravagant life-style, flying first class all around the country and hosting lavish dinners to let the rich folks of America and their most trusted advisors know how lucky they all were that we were there to rescue them from their life of mediocre grant-making.

We were received very graciously. It takes a while to learn the difference between graciousness and receptivity, but never mind. I wasn’t there yet. I took all this smiling and nodding and complimentary chatter to mean that Bob Goheen didn’t have a clue. What could he have been thinking, anyhow?

Over the first six months, we probably put our pitch before a hundred or more individuals and families who maintained large private foundations and grant-making programs without benefit of professional staff. Any day now, they’d begin hiring us to help them do it right.

Any day now.

Any day now?

Hello? Are you still out there? Remember the nice meeting we had back…you what? You think it’s a nice idea…but…not just yet?

Well, clearly they needed more convincing, and we needed more prospects. So we took to some re-visits, and some aggressive digging to set up more meetings with fresh candidates who might hire us. Our efforts produced lots of cordial encounters and no contracts.

I have been selling for a long time. Since I was eight or nine, actually, when I carried newspapers. I was twelve when I underwent my first formal sales training so I could sell vacuum cleaners (“Airway Sanitizers”) door-to-door in Fresno. I have sold things that cost a few dollars, and a few million dollars. And in every instance, two things have remained true:

First, the formula that I learned in the training class for selling Airway Sanitizers. Our instructor told the class—the rest were adults—that we could rely on the following ratios: 20/10/5/4/2/1. Here’s what the numbers meant: out of every 20 people who are a gleam in your eye, you will only succeed in qualifying and connecting with 10. Of those ten, five of them will grant you a sales call. Of the five sales calls, one will cancel and you will actually make four presentations. You will sell two of those four. And one of the two will renege on the deal.

If you have ever sold for a living, you will immediately recognize the truth of this formula.

The second invariably-valid lesson is this: while the very best thing that can happen is to get a “yes” that really means “yes”, the next best thing that can happen is a very fast “no”. A very fast “no”.

It’s the slow “no” that kills you. That lures you into persisting at the wrong thing. That eats up your working capital. That eats away at your spirit, your self-confidence, your morale. That inflicts massive “opportunity cost” on you.

The would-be clientele for Foundation Managers, Inc., were masters of the slow “no”. Many had been approached because they were rich friends, or rich friends of rich friends, or well-placed people networked into a social constellation in which no one wanted to give offense. And so with exquisitely good manners they avoided rejecting our proposition bluntly, quickly, cleanly. They kept it “under consideration” until we were almost ruined.

Well, I don’t always learn from others’ advice, but I usually do learn from experience. And by the end of the first year I had learned that these folks were never going to constitute a market for us. Bob Goheen had been absolutely, positively, dead-on in his analysis of our target market. They were accustomed to hearing laudatory speeches praising their “generosity” and to hearing endless streams of sycophantic supplicants tell them how wonderful they were.

And we were telling them they were doing a lousy job.

Gee, what could possibly be wrong with that approach?

So I had to make a decision: dismantle the operation, or find a real market for our services.

The fatal flaw in the private philanthropy target-market was the self-satisfaction of our would-be customers, and the self-satisfaction was the product of two factors: first, the tidal wave of affirmation in which philanthropists are marinated; second, the absence of accountability to any standards of excellence. Just give away the money to qualified grantees, and that’s it. How hard could that be? How could anybody criticize you for not having done it better?

So I knew that any fresh approach would have to be directed to a market where there was at least a modicum of accountability for the use of dollars. Obviously governmental spending (except for porkbarrel earmarks) was subject to rigorous legislative and regulatory stipulations and bureaucratic review, but I wanted none of that.

This left the corporate-contributions market. The more I studied it, the better it looked. Despite the capriciousness of many corporate donations (to pet projects of the CEO’s wife, or scratch-my-back, quid pro quo arrangements with other corporate leaders) American corporations “gave away” hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Most of this went to “good works”, the kind of blameless civic improvements that anyone would applaud. It was tantamount to a sort of additional tax on corporations, to show that they were extra-good citizens.

I smelled an opening here. What if you thought about these dollars differently. What if their expenditure were to be held as accountable to corporate strategy as any other expenditures the company makes. What if they were dedicated to strengthening the company’s well-being at the very same time they were strengthening society’s well-being.

In short order, we had it all worked out. Our plan was to sit with the senior executives of a client company to learn everything we could about their long-range corporate strategy. We would then identify the factors in society that would facilitate or enhance that strategy. Did it rely on a workforce that was literate? Did it rely on widespread understanding of certain health problems? Did it presuppose a societal acknowledgement of global warming? Did it require technological breakthroughs from sources other than their own R&D team?

Once we knew where they wanted to go and what societal factors might clear the pathway while simultaneously improving society at large, we would map out a multi-year (even multi-decade) grant-making program. This program would establish a durable partnership between the company and an orchestrated network of non-profit organizations we had identified (including some that we would custom-create for the purpose) that could make the difference we were after.

This was a win/win/win proposition. The donor company would accelerate its progress toward its goals. Society at large would gain the benefit of the improvements. And the not-for-profit grantees would know that, instead of chasing around frantically every year to secure funding for their budgets, they could count on multi-year financing from their highly motivated, long-term corporate partner.

Once again, I was full of confidence in the business concept. But this time around, I had the benefit of my prior foolishness in overestimating the receptivity of a target market. That memory of that foolishness and denial had driven me to a deeper analysis of the possible benefits for my intended clients, and to a scathingly realistic assessment of the barriers I might encounter.

And I also knew I had to be able to put the business proposition in terms that would be instantly, unmistakably clear to my prospect—to use analogies with them that would remove any question about what we wanted to do for them or why they might value it. I wanted my pitch to evoke that holy grail of selling: the involuntary head-nod. The nod they don’t even realize they are nodding that tells you this prospect really “gets it”.

Once the concept was firmly established, I set out to score a flagship client.

I decided to start at the top with what was at that time the largest corporation in America—AT&T, which had nearly a million employees and a near-total monopoly on the telephone business in the U.S. I approached the then-Chairman and CEO of AT&T, an acquaintance from Princeton, who introduced me to Ed—the senior executive who was responsible for AT&T’s massive advertising, public relations, and corporate contributions programs. We arranged to meet for lunch at his club in New York City.

The waiter took our drink order and Ed got right down to business. “Okay,
Eliot, you called this meeting. What’s on your mind?”

“As I understand it, Ed, you’re responsible for advertising, PR, and corporate contributions at AT&T, right?” I responded.

“Yep.”

“Well,” I continued, “you have an outside agency that handles your advertising—N.W. Ayer, right?”

“Yep. Been together for almost a hundred years. We like long relationships.”

“And you have an outside agency that handles AT&T’s PR, too.”

“Right. It’s also a long-time relationship. Great people,” Ed replied.

“Good,” I responded and moved in for the coup de grace. “We want to be your outside agency for corporate contributions.”

Ripples of puzzlement danced fleetingly across Ed’s face before he tipped his head forward so far I couldn’t read his face any more. A long moment later he looked up, fixed me with a clear eye, and said firmly, “Okay, you’re hired.”

Then his gaze swivelled away, slowly drifted searchingly from side to side, meandered a little. He chewed on his lower lip for a second. At last he let his eyes drift past mine and said as they settled on his folded hands, “Eliot, I don’t exactly know how to tell you this, but I’ve been in this job for five years, and the truth is I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an outside agency for corporate contributions.”

“Well, Ed,” I replied, “Don’t feel bad. Until you said ‘You’re hired’, there wasn’t. We’re the first one, and you’re the first client.”

His face flushed with surprise and relief, the waiter appeared with our drinks at that very instant, we toasted with a smile but without a word, and a wonderful business—and relationship—was born.

And as I have discovered in every enterprise I’ve been involved with, there’s nothing quite so powerful as a flagship client. Once prospective clients see that you are good enough for AT&T (or Johnson & Johnson or Mayo Clinic or whomever, in my other ventures), they are inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. They figure (properly, in most cases) that the name-brand flagship client had put you through a rigorous vetting process, and when they see that your relationship with the flagship has sustained itself over many years and many additional assignments, their confidence soars. With AT&T atop the client list at our newly-named Corporate Contributions, Inc., this dynamic paid off handsomely.

Having a bright idea and pursuing it is a thrill under any circumstances. But it’s particularly gratifying to create a successful business out of the near-wreckage of a failing one. The truth is that nothing that I’ve ever been involved in has turned out the way I imagined at the moment of conception. The mid-course corrections are both inevitable and almost always vastly more valuable than the original idea.

Sometimes a little luck helps, too. Within a year or so, Judge Harold Greene, presiding over a federal court determination of whether AT&T’s dominance constituted a de facto monopoly, ordered the famous and fateful breakup of AT&T, creating seven spin-off companies that suddenly needed their own corporate contributions strategies.

We were only too happy to help.

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM, JOIN THEM

For ten years, my friend Roger had wrestled with a challenge everyone thought was a fool’s errand: to program a computer to do psychotherapy. Some years before, a clumsy piece of software called “Lisa” had made the first such attempt, based on the somewhat simplistic notion that a therapy methodology devised by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist largely reflects back to the client almost verbatim what the client just said, could be done by a computer—afterall, computers do largely whatever they’re told, and if they’re told to repeat-after-me, how hard could that be?

Harder than they thought, since the nuances of therapist/client interaction in Rogerian therapy accounted for much of the healing dynamic—something “Lisa’s” creators underestimated and something no computer could ever hope to accomplish.

There was rejoicing among the psychotherapy community at “Lisa’s” oftentimes laughable failure, since they were approximately as enthusiastic about having their jobs taken away by a computer as chess grandmasters looked forward to having IBM’s “Deep Blue” learn to routinely check-mate them.

But Roger was not daunted. For starters, computers had become far more sophisticated in the decade since “Lisa”. Even more importantly, Roger’s own highly respected therapeutic modality of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy was demonstrably more effective than Carl Rogers’ valuable but ultimately too-limited innovation. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst running the outpatient programs at a major university medical center, Roger had a broad base of observation from which to discern what approaches were working for clients, and which ones were not. And he thought he could figure out how to cook the successful approaches into a computer program.

If he could succeed, the payoff would be enormous. The need of a stressed-out American population for some transient counseling far outstrips both the available therapists and the available money to pay them. Health insurance companies have traditionally put severe limits on what they will cover, and at $100/hr., few people can afford many visit out of their own pocket.

But a computer program that would let them work their way through their current problem, now that would be a breakthrough for certain. That is why I persuaded one of my philantropic-consulting clients to fund Roger in setting up a research project to see how far he could carry this idea. They liked the idea, put up a significant amount of money, and the venture was born.

Ten years later, Roger’s computerized psychotherapy program was working. Not just working, but working far better than anyone had dared hope. The decade of brilliant conceptual architecture, dogged experimentation, well-crafted tests and trials, rapidly evolving sophistication of computers, an increasingly experienced research team, and fresh rounds of financing all conspired to produce a program that worked as well as any human psychotherapist for most clients.

Huh? Worked as well as a human psychotherapist?

That’s right. As demonstrated in formal clinical trials at highly reputable medical research institutions, about 75% of clients improved as much as, or more than, carefully matched “control subjects” who received “live”, face-to-face psychotherapy from a top-drawer professional. Hard to believe, but true.

About that time, I had grown restive at the firm Mitch and I had formed some eleven years prior. The more successful we got, the more one client assignment began to feel just like the one before. This quasi-routinization was great for business. It wasn’t so great for me, and I found myself itching for something different. So I was engaged in a year-long process of winding down my involvement with the firm in favor of something new.

That something new came in the form of an invitation by Roger. With his program now documented for its clinical efficacy, he felt it was time to commercialize it—something he knew little about. He asked me to join him as President of the company I’d helped get started a decade before and transform it from a R&D shop into a thriving business.

Perfect. Perfect timing for me, and perfect timing for such an innovation in the healthcare business.

It was the late ‘80s, and the revolution that was sweeping through healthcare in those years was monumental. At the start of that decade, hospitals routinely relied on designated, protected “catchment areas” whereby they’d automatically get all the patients who lived in that area, and on “cost-plus” financing whereby they’d spend however much money they felt like spending and somebody (insurors, employers, state and federal governments) would just send them a check to cover all the costs. It was truly a no-brainer of a business.

Until something called DRGs hit. Suddenly the people who paid the bills said they, not the hospitals, would decide how much they would pay for, say, a gall bladder operation. Each medical condition was given a code—the “DRG”, or Diagnosis-Related Grouping—to which a price tag was affixed. If the hospital incurred more than that amount, it would lose money on the case. Less costs incurred? Hey, a profit on the case!

To make matters worse for hospital adminstrators, states evaporated the concept of the protected catchment area. Suddenly, there were no walls or moats between hospitals in the same or adjoining communities, and all patients were fair game for whoever could compete for them most successfully.

These were the challenges our consulting company had been helping our client hospitals cope with, the challenges I now found a bit too repetitious to be of continuing interest. But I could see that the challenge was going to be revitalized dramatically in the world of mental health, as yet untouched by the DRG/competition revolution. Because over 90% of healthcare costs are related to medical and surgical incidents, the revolution was aimed at curbing those monumental costs. The relatively insignificant 10% going to mental health had been given a free pass—so far.

I knew, however, that in due course the scrutiny of the cost-cutters would fall upon the notoriously ill-defined processes and outcomes of mental health treatment. And when it did, the providers of psychotherapy would be hard-pressed to demonstrate the value they were providing. Unlike the relatively well-researched and well–documented processes and outcomes in medicine and surgery, what went on behind the closed doors of psychotherapists’ offices was poorly understood, poorly documented, and poorly evaluated.

That would have to change. When the cost-cutters came to call on psychotherapists, they would demand to know what they did and how it mattered. Why was it worth whatever was paid? Prove it.

Good luck. Most psychotherapists kept few if any records of treatment, other than a few quickly scribbled notes they could consult just before the patient’s next visit, to ensure some continuity of discussion topics in these so-called “talk therapy” sessions. How could they ever possibly satisfy the demands of hard-nosed payers who wanted proof of value—or no more money.

Well, the answer seemed pretty simple to Roger and me. Use the computer with your patients. It would present them with a highly structured, disciplined thinking process that gets to the heart of their pain and then tracks them through the steps they take to recover from whatever ails them. The computer will document their every step and keep a written record of the entire process, to provide incontrovertible proof of progress and value.

What is more, during the time one patient is working on the computer, the psychotherapist could be reviewing the computer work of another patient with him or her, doubling the volume of clients that could be seen in a day. This would lift the inflexible ceiling that limits all by-the-hour professionals’ income. You can’t make more hours in the day, but if you could get more revenue out of each hour, well, what could possibly be wrong with that proposition?

Everything, as it turned out.

A matter of weeks after I took the product to market, the market taught me—once again—that it had its own ideas and was perfect capable of ignoring mine. By now I was a bit more adept at listening for the flaws in our proposition, and what I learned came fast and clear.

For starters (and this would have been enough all by itself to doom the approach), every psychotherapist on earth deeply believes that he or she is, as a person, the essential vehicle through which the patient’s healing takes place. This belief holds that the dynamic relationship between my patient and myself stimulates and catalyzes whatever recovery of health my patient comes to enjoy. The relationship is sine qua non, literally “without which, nothing”.

Take that away, put my patient in front of a computer? What, are you crazy?

This belief flows forward unchecked from history. History, first, of the origins of psychotherapy when Freud and others worked with certain categories of patients whose particular difficulties did, in fact, require some re-working of troubling relationships which could be replicated in therapy sessions, enabling the patient to work out on the therapist—through something called “transference”—the damaging feelings they’d been unable to exorcise in real life toward, for example, an abusive father. Such psychoanalytic engagements often lasted for many, many years and resulted in wholesale reconstruction of a patient’s personality. So there was legitimate historical basis for the belief that relationship-is-all.

But the belief hadn’t been updated more than half a century, that was the problem. Freud did his seminal work with a tiny handful of patients before World War I. In the post-Vietnam years, the tens of thousands of people who sought therapy were more likely to be dealing with the common stresses of everyday living—a bad marriage, a devastating loss, unruly kids, a dead-end job.

A more personal piece of history blocked psychotherapists’ ability to embrace computerized therapy. They had themselves undertaken years and years and years of study, in formal academic courses, in internships and apprenticeships, in continuing professional development seminars—all designed to hone their skills and gifts to an exquisite level.

And now you’re telling me a damned computer can do better than I can?

The personal insult was more than they could bear.

But that wasn’t all. Each of them had been confronted in their studies and training with a panoply of therapeutic schools of thought: psychodynamic, behaviorist, humanist, family-systems, cognitive-behavioral, and so on. Roger’s computer program was based on a cognitive-behavioral approach, none too appetizing to those myriad therapists who believed their career-long success was due to adherence to a totally different approach.

Hang on. There’s more.

Some were technophobes, not yet remotely comfortable with computers and such. These were people who relied, after all, on conversation to achieve their clinical results.

Others were terminally put off by the tarnished reputation of Lisa.

Most had office space that consisted of one den-like room with a couple of comfortable chairs and a modest desk at which the therapist would later compose invoices for patients. They simply lacked the physical facilities that would accommodate a computer work-station where even one patient could do the program, let alone

Finally, none of them—none of them—had even the dimmest foreshadowing of the DRG hammer that was about to drop on them. They were almost universally oblivious to what was already well underway in the world of medicine and surgery. The few who knew about it were in complete denial that this could ever happen in the world of mental health.
Our great program a no-brainer? How about a non-starter.

Well, as I have long come to realize, one good mid-course correction is worth an infinite number of Sysiphusian shoves. “Roger,” I said, “these guys are never going to be our customers.” He took no convincing. Even is the few weeks of market testing I had done, he immediately recognized how lethal the barriers were. But what to do? We can’t just trash a decade’s worth of work, and especially we can’t just abandon the possibility of giving millions of people some relief they’ll just never get otherwise.

“They’ll never be our customers,” I repeated, “but they’d be pretty easy pickin’s as competitors.”

What did I mean “as competitors”?

“Let’s forget about selling the computer program to them and take the business away from them instead,” I continued. “Let’s get into the psychotherapy business ourselves, using our program as the basis of a therapy visit, and sell the service wholesale directly to the people who pay the bills for patients—the health insurance companies. We know we can produce the clinical results they’re looking for, and for half the price of traditional therapy.”

Within months, we opened clinics in a number of southern California locations. Each one featured computers with Roger’s program that was administered by a licensed clinical therapist. The patient spent thirty or forty minutes at the computer, and then did a ten-minute check-out with the therapist who monitored the progress the patient was making and was alert for any danger signs. Contracts with the largest insurors of mental health benefits provided a steady stream of patients from the 600,000 or so employees they covered for major corporations like Disney.

Doing a one-eighty on the definition of our customer had changed everything. The big insurors instantly grasped the benefits to themselves, their clients, and the employee-patients who would now have easy access to a non-threating, non-stigmatizing process for dealing with everyday stresses. Because we minimized the amount of professional labor required, we could keep the costs well below what even in their most aggressive cost-cutting mode the payers had ever imagined possible.

In due course, the program migrated to the internet, where—as we had imagined from the outset—it would find its ultimate utility. In addition to the core program, tailored editions now address specific challenges such as overeating.

Epilogue

People wonder how a computer-based program could be as—or even more—effective when compared with a live therapist. There are several reasons:

When confronted with serious life challenges that threaten one’s mental tranquility and even stability, most of us turn first to all manner of self-treatment. Denial, angry outbursts, overeating, alcohol and drugs, gambling, sleeping around, becoming reclusive, resigning ourselves to depression, or whatever. Only after we have exhausted all these homespun remedies will we consider actually “seeing somebody”.

This means that once we do finally surrender to the notion of getting some psychotherapy, we have lost all hope that we ourselves can do anything to help ourselves. Now it’s all up to this person with the degrees framed on the wall over the desk to take charge and fix me. So we enter the therapy room and figuratively dump ourselves into the therapist’s lap and wait for them to work their magic.

But at the same time we’re sufficiently ashamed of being stuck the way we are and of our multiple failed attempts at self-healing and whatever that may have led us into, that we’re a bit reluctant to share all our dirty laundry right away. After all, we’ve never met this stranger-therapist before, and we’re very unsure how much we can trust him or her. If we give the therapist too much information—painful, embarrassing information—will the therapist somehow use that against us, or lord it over us, or…? We run a quick ego calculation and realize that giving the therapist all the dirt on ourselves puts us into a one-down position: the therapist is now superior, and we are inferior. Not a heart-warming prospect.

So it takes a person a while—often three or four visits—before they are prepared to give the therapist the real low-down the therapist needs to comprehend in order to get to work. And even then, the therapist still has to overhaul the patient’s mistaken understanding of whose work it is—it’s the patient’s job, not the therapist’s.

(And there’s also the wild card of the therapist himself or herself. Are they really any good? Smart? Well-trained? Or mediocre. Even if they are usually good, are they having a good day that particular day or are they dealing with some personal aggravation or illness or tiredness that diminishes their competence for the moment? There was a prominent psychotherapist in Princeton who was famous for falling asleep during therapy sessions he was theortically conducting. I can attest to this firsthand. One of my friends who also sought this therapist’s help tip-toed out of the office after the therapist nodded off, ferociously slamming the door behind him with a huge, window-rattling “Bang!” I think the gesture actually relieved whatever was troubling my friend and was tantamount to “terminating therapy”.)

Contrast the dynamic of the overly-dependent new patient’s first encounter with a live therapist, with that of confronting a computer that promises to help the patient solve the problem for themselves. No awkwardness about revealing embarrassing data. No issues with ego-based power struggles. No dancing around wasting time getting ready to trust the therapist. And, most importantly, no possibility that the real work was going to be done by somebody else: It was my problem when I walked in here and, guess what, it’s still my problem. I guess I’d better get to work on it. Nobody else is going to.

And the computer never has a bad day. It’s always going to follow the line of inquiry and produce the clarifying feedback it was designed to do, and for the vast majority of people who let it do its work to guide them through their work, relief comes in about three sessions total. That was the average in our clinics. Three sessions, and people felt they had gotten what they needed. In live therapy, most patients are just getting started in three sessions.

Sadly, most payers have now severely restricted reimbursement for any kind of “talk therapy”—computer-assisted, or not—in favor of medicating people with psychotropic drugs. The pills are cheaper and, when they don’t work all that well, people still have the option of augmenting them with self-destructive home remedies. The cost-cutters have had the last word once again, the best interests of the patient notwithstanding. No wonder Americans pay vastly more for our healthcare per capita than any other nation but endure dramatically worse health status than most other industrialized countries. But that’s another story entirely…

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Steve was the Chairman of the Board of his family-held company, and he looked the part. Tall, elegant, soft-spoken, gentlemanly, secure enough to be thoughtful about the people around him. The company, started by his father, was enormously successful. Their more-than-fifty-site operations all but dominated the industry they were in. Steve was personally respected by both his customers and his competitors.

Many family members were to be found in the executive suite, some pulling their weight, some just hanging out enjoying the view. These family members were the third generation, and the hangers-out were gliding along on an invisible current of entitlement, secure in the knowledge that anyone would ever call them to account. They had enjoyed a cruise through the best prep schools, put in their time at well-regarded if undistinguished colleges, and then slotted themselves into sinecures within the family enterprise. What, me worry?

That is probably why, when Steve finally retired when well into his eighties, the company fell apart. Sank without even a whimper. Gone.

For all his wonderful qualities, Steve had failed in one of the most important tasks that befell him as head of the company and head of his clan: to prepare the next generation of leaders. I don’t know if this succession-planning just never occurred to Steve, or whether he just didn’t know how to do it, or didn’t have the heart for it, or what. But it never got done, and a well-established firm that should have, could have, owned the lion’s share of their market for generations yet to come.

I suspect Steve was just too nice. Too nice to establish the disciplines, the standards, the accountability, the assessment systems that would have revealed to him and to his staff who was—and who was not—actually carrying their weight in the company. Too nice to let the hammer fall on a son or cousin or neice or nephew or grandchild. Too nice to let truth—which is sometimes hard to bear—fall rudely on someone he loved.

As a result, there was no one capable of leading the rest of the team when Steve hung up his cleats. So the team disbanded and the business literally disappeared.

While Steve had fallen into his role as Chairman and CEO by birth, another nice guy who came to grief as CEO was chosen by a supposedly capable search committee. The setting was a major university which had an academic medical center—medical school, hospital, and faculty practice plan. All four of the entities had been separate corporate organizations for ages, although the university had long since been the financial beneficiary of the hospital’s historically reliable excess revenues. The medical-center activities were, in short, a cash cow that materially boosted the well-being of the university.

When the crunch hit American hospitals in the ‘80s, inflicting on them reduced compensation for the services they rendered, many—including this hospital—began losing money for the first time in their history. First a trickle, then a multi-million-dollar hemorrhage. My God! Our cash cow is suddenly bleeding out! A thrill of panic shuddered through the university adminstration building, and they responded with a classic knee-jerk spasm, deciding to merge the three ingredients of the academic medical center. Surely there must be some economies to be had there, right?

Few bureaucracies on earth are as well entrenched or deeply defended as the turf—and the treasuries—of the organizational elements that make up an academic medical center. The hospital, the medical school, and the faculty practice all step to very different drummers, with radically different financial dynamics, political structures, and personality profiles. And few have much patience for the ways of the others.

(At another major academic medical center, Mitch and I noticed after our first three or four interviews alone with the various chiefs of service that each one had, at some point in the interview, spontaneously started vilifying one or another of his colleagues. Once we realized the pattern was inevitable, Mitch and I set up a lottery before each interview we did. We mentally divided the hour into six ten-minute segments, and with a flip of the coin one of us would get the first, third, and fifth segments, and the other the even-numbered segments. Then you won a point every time the spontaneous dissing of a colleague occurred in one of your segments. Loser bought the drinks at the end of each disgusting day.)

Anyhow, back to our impetuously merged melange. In its infinite wisdom, the university’s CEO search committee decided that the nice man—the very, very nice man, the lovable man—who was then Dean of the Medical School would be the right person to guide these three organizations into the bridal suite and consummate their corporate menage a trois. Perhaps there was something about the other two leaders that made them undesirable candidates. Perhaps they didn’t want to offend all three by doing an external search. Perhaps they thought that his gentlemanly demeanor, his soft, diplomatic style, his respectful and cerebral approach to issues would serve to harmonize the powerful leaders of the three entities, now including his own successor as Dean of the medical school. Who knows why? I don’t. But what a terrible choice.

Better to have asked Fred Rogers to referee a World Wrestling Federation championship. Or to have fought in one.

Within minutes of our commencing our work to help them think through a strategy for this newly formed, or malformed, colossus, it was excruciatingly clear that nobody had any intention whatsoever of voluntarily consummating this shotgun marriage. Outright hostility was the order of the day, ranging from flat-out refusal to attend meetings to clever sabotage of early initiatives designed to create essential linkages.

The most blatant act of mutiny came when the faculty practice plan, which had over ninety million dollars of surplus languishing in its accounts, refused to make three or four million dollars available to the hospital so it could purchase a computerized system for tracking patients’ length of stay in the hospital—a critical measure of cost overruns vs. profits on any given patient encounter. Their decision could not have been more short-sighted. The hospital was like the main hull of a trimaran, and if they understood that a leak in that one big hull was now capable of pulling all three craft to the bottom, they gave no hint of it.

Clearly, the entities were consolidated in name only, and it was absolutely essential that the CEO lay forceful claim to the levers of control, including for example commandeering the ninety million dollars, if he were to have any hope whatesoever of bringing about a functional merger. So Mitch and I began having dinner with the CEO once a week. Each dinner together in the university’s faculty club would begin with our spelling out one—just one—single step he needed to take to begin to gather the reins of power into his hands so that he could eventually lead a cooperative team toward a common goal.

When we would lay out the week’s initiative, he would initially get that deer-in-the-headlights look, shudder almost imperceptibly, twist uncomfortably. Then, as we quietly, patiently, carefully laid out the reasons why this particular move mattered, he would gradually begin to nod in recognition. By half an hour later, he’d be speaking right up, averring that he really got it now, that this was something he really had to do and he would, by George. First thing tomorrow morning, he’d make the call or see the person or set up the process.

We took to phoning him the next afternoon following our dinnertime pep talks. And with depressing regularity, he had repented of his previous evening’s determination, always with an eminently reasonable-sounding rationale for ducking the difficult task. We knew almost immediately that he was doomed, but we persisted in our dinners for many months in hopes that a miracle might happen.

Of course it never did, and he was out of there within a year, replaced by the bare-knuckled, head-knocking type that is regrettably sometimes required when recalcitrance is the prevailing attitude among should-be colleagues. He was wildly unloved but accomplished some necessary changes required to make the merger function.

But the ham-fisted types are certainly not guaranteed to be any more successful than a truly skilled leader who helps conflicted or inexperienced parties to compose a shared vision of a future they all aspire to, and then helps them collaborate to achieve it. The bullying leader often creates a situation where his teammates are seemingly compliant but actually woeful underperformers.

I had the opportunity to observe firsthand the effects of another domineering CEO who prompted cowering throughout the entire company, not just among his direct reports. Robert ran a major American airline with an iron fist—and a rapid index finger with which, it was said, he would routinely dial the number of any—absolutely any—one of the 50,000 employees of “his” company, at any hour of the day or night, to demand to know why this or that or the other thing was, or was not, happening in their department.

The only acceptable answer was a complete, thorough, fact-based disquisition such as a Ph.D. candidate might provide a panel of examiners assessing his dissertation.

You did not say, “Well, I don’t know about that, sir. It’s the first I have heard of it. But I’ll check into it immediately and get right back to you!”

“Don’t bother,” would come the frigid reply. “We’ll find somebody else to do your job right.”

Now, this is the kind of tale that often bounces around large corporations, and I’ve learned over the years that they are invariably the in-house equivalent of an “urban legend”—maybe some faint original glimmer of truth that over the years became exaggerated into a monstrous myth.

So when I first started consulting with this airline and heard the myth everywhere I went, I was slightly amused but not the least credulous about it. However, it cropped up persistently, in each meeting I had with a management team. As myths go, this one was permeating the organization like a sulphurous odor. In fact, as we analyzed how people were spending their time at work, we realized to our astonishment that a very large proportion of their day was given over to preparing for the possibility of getting The Call From The Boss.

We had been retained to improve their organizational performance, and now we discovered that hours per day are devoted to CYA (cover-your-arse) activities. Checking on information from subordinates. Going over financials. Gathering data on throughput or efficiencies or deadlines met or whatever. Checking. Checking. More checking.

And nobody—just nobody—thinking about tomorrow or next week or next year. Nobody thinking about how the industry might be changing and how to respond to, or even lead, the changes. Nobody working to enhance the company’s competitive stature. Nobody nurturing the corporate culture or workplace gratification or…

This is ridiculous, I though. Thirty or forty percent of the energy of this workforce is being held hostage to this ridiculous myth. Time to blow this one out of the water.

“Okay,” I finally said when the myth found its way into the upteenth discussion, “let’s do some reality testing here. I know that stories like this usually have some basis in truth, way back when. The CEO might reached way down and called one lower-level person who was involved in a screwup, and maybe he did fire them on the spot for not knowing something he thought they should have known. But it’s just a bit hard for me to swallow that the CEO of this massive corporation routinely riffles through the company directory and rings up somebody six levels below him to conduct an inquisition and maybe an execution.”

The impassive team looked at me impassively, like “Yeah? Says who?”

“So, let me just ask you this,” I continued. “How many of you, right here in this room, the twelve of you, how many of you have either gotten a call yourself from the CEO, or know for certain that your own boss has gotten such a call, or know for certain that one of your direct reports has gotten such a call.”

The myth-buster at work, right? Wrong.

Nine hands went up. Nine of the twelve.

Then one hand was retracted. “I just realized—it wasn’t my direct report herself. It was somebody who reported to her.”

Eight out of twelve. No myth.

Sometimes, there’s just not much you can do in a situation like that. I don’t think I’ve ever shrunk from a tough challenge—in fact, they’re the most fun—but as the song goes, you got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. And I was never fond of taking people’s money without leaving commensurate benefit behind, so I gracefully extricated myself from that engagement, just as we had declined any add-on work at the medical center where they specialized in savaging their colleagues. The fun of our little lottery didn’t offset the distaste we had for such a toxic environment.

But I’ve learned that one always has to hold open the possibility of a pleasant surprise.

Take Rick, the CEO of a major medical center. Rick was tough, demanding, irascible, aggressive, ambitious, smart. Well, smart about some things, but cerainly not about succession planning. And not about the shadow his oversized ego cast on the organization.

A newly acquired client, Rick invited me to sit in on his Executive Committee meeting so he could introduce me to them as we began our work together. Did I say “meeting”? That was no meeting. I thought I was witnessing a reverse-gender version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Snow White played by General George C. Patton.

Rick sat at the head of the table—nothing wrong with that; he was the CEO, after all—but his team, if you could call them that, ringed the oversize table slunk down in their chairs, eyes cast downward to the table top as though studying whatever papers were before them, hoping, praying, to escape Rick’s notice. None of them made eye contact with Rick, and clearly none wanted to. Rick proceeded to blast through his agenda of telling them all what to do. Orders. Lots of orders. More orders. Then he demanded reports of progress from one or two of them whose voices all but quivered in delivering whatever news they offered. Rick snorted a few comments and then abruptly adjourned the meeting.

I was scheduled for individual meetings with each member of his executive staff later that day and the following day. When I finished my one-on-one sessions, my suspicions were well confirmed.

I ended my rounds back in Rick’s palatial office. “You’ve got a problem, Rick,” I told him. “The problem is that you have surrounded yourself with ciphers. What’s going on here, anyhow? These guys are not executives. They’re clerks. What the hell’s going to happen to this place if you get hit by a bus?”

Rick’s head jerked around a bit like a bobble-head doll, not quite sure what was happening. He fumbled for words, and then lamely challenged my seemingly hasty assessment of his team. I was in no mood to play games, already cranky as a result of the speeding ticket I got driving to their place.

“You’re within a few years of retirement. Which one of them is the next CEO of this place?”.

Well, er, ah, hmmm. None of them, I guess. “But,” he rebutted, “what’s wrong with recruiting a new CEO from the outside? It’s done all the time.”

“What kind of a CEO do you think would want to take the job if it meant inheriting this bunch. Start off here by having to fire and replace them all? Or, worse, by leaving them in place and trying to coax them into serious action? Good luck.”

Rick didn’t have anything to say, so I continued.

“More to the point,” I continued, “you have deprived yourself of the kind of well-informed, tough-minded, challenging feedback and aggressive initiatives real executives provide that would make you a better CEO and make this organization a far more successful business. Surrounding yourself with midgets may make you feel tall, but it sure wreaks havoc on the overall stature of the place.”

I went back to my office and wrote up a report for him, summarizing my initial impressions and suggesting a course of action for him to take. When he engaged us, we had both imagined that our consulting relationship with his company would be of long duration like our other client relationships, and so my report outlined further work that we would do with them to implement my recommendations. I left the ball in his court.

Funny thing, he never responded. The follow-on work died aborning, and that was that. I was neither surprised nor disappointed. I had harbored no illusions about how tickled he was to receive my Dutch Uncle lecture. We had plenty of other work to do, and I hadn’t looked forward to working within the strangled atmosphere Rick had established.

Well, I actually did have some slight concern: Rick held an exceptionally prominent position in the healthcare industry and was frequently a speaker at industry conferences. If he chose to bad-mouth us through his network of CEOs, we might possibly lose some future business elsewhere. But you can’t lose sleep over such worrisome speculation, and so I let it go. The truth is, we had something of a reputation for speaking bluntly, and our clients frequently voiced their appreciation for it. We had plenty of positive references and longstanding relationships that would offset anything derogatory he might say.

A few years later, Rick was scheduled to give a speech to a large gathering at the annual conference of the American Hospital Association. He was speaking about an issue I was interested in, so I couldn’t resist slipping into the rear of the large, darkened hall to hear what he had to say. I stood near the doors, in the shadows under a balcony where I would not be evident. After he finished speaking, he engaged in Q&A with the audience.

A number of exchanges bounced back and forth between him and audience members. But then in response to one question about medical-center management, Rick shook it off with an answer that absolutely floored me: “The truth is, I’m not the best person to advise you about that. You really ought to talk to Eliot Daley. He’s standing back there by the doors. He came to our place a few years back and helped us enormously. We made some significant changes in that area, and I’ve been very grateful to him ever since.”

Will miracles never cease?

K.I.S.S.

It’s easy to overthink strategy. The truth of that was brought home to me one weekend at an elegant country inn tucked in a wooded glade in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. The dozen or so people gathered there represented the cream of the crop in business strategy.

Each year, we at Arthur D. Little, Inc., identified one key element of business success—strategy, supply-chain management, information systems, finance, R&D, human resources, or whatever—and then scanned the entire world to determine which companies were the very best at the particular function we had teed up that year. A panel of independent judges sifted out the best of the best, and we invited the top ten or so to meet with a few of us from ADL for a spiffy weekend to think great thoughts together. Our goal was to learn from them, so we could enhance our own ability to serve our clients.

The year we focused on strategy, the companies we invited to attend included Fidelity, Hewlett-Packard, Shell, and Toyota, and they all sent their senior executive most responsible for setting corporate strategy. We had a couple of presidents, a couple of executive vice-presidents, and in the case of Toyota, their vice-chairman of the board.

The key session was Saturday when I invited each of the attendees to stand up and tell us how they formulated company strategy, and what the most critical element of it was. One after another, these very bright men (all men, as it turned out) stood up for twenty or thirty minutes and, with remarkable candor, spelled out the intricate ways in which they analyzed their markets, gathered stunningly insightful data on their competitors, probed and feinted and jabbed and unleashed salvos of products and marketing ploys, all the better to crush the competition and to establish durable market share.

The representative of Hewlett-Packard added an interesting dimension beyond the street-fight maneuverings vs. competitors the previous speakers had talked about. He said that at H-P, they made a regular practice of creating internal competition. The formed up teams whose job it was to come up with a product that was better than the current H-P product in whatever category they were assigned. The rationale for this was that H-P knew better than their competition what weaknesses were present in the current H-P products, and so they were better equipped to create the successor product that would be even better. Besides, he went on to explain, by the time their competitors figured out how to beat any given H-P product that was on the market, H-P would already be introducing their own better mousetrap and render the competition’s best efforts moot.

One after another, these strategists rose and stood before us to tell how they outwit their competition, and one had to admire the braininess of their varied approaches. There was a quiet ferocity to the efforts they described, and the work was intense and draining, but there was no denying the payoff. As the winners in our search for the most successful business strategies in the entire world, what they were doing was clearly working pretty well for them.

Last to speak was the vice-chairman of the board of directors of Toyota. A mid-fiftyish gentleman with the rounded build and demure demeanor of a teddy bear, he rose to his feet with some deliberation and moved somewhat hesitantly to the front of the room as though unsure that he was doing the right thing. Once in place, he shifted from one foot to the other, shook his head very slowly and apologetically, and began speaking.

“I am most sorry to disappoint you. So many have describe strategy of their company very well. Show many ideas for ways to beat competition. I can not do same as they do. At Toyota, we are not thinking about competition.” He looked down, shifted again, rocked from side to side a little uncomfortably, then planted himself solidly, drew a breath, and looked straight at us.

He spoke softly and directly, as though we might scoff at what he was about to say but it was all he had to offer: “I tell you what we do at Toyota. We strive to live in harmony with our customer. To live in harmony with the economy. To live in harmony with the earth. That is our strategy. Harmony with customer, economy, earth. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

With that, he returned to his seat.

We had heard nine variations on a fist-fight. And one description of a ballet.

No wonder they’re outfooting the competition.

COVERAGE

I did call once. The line was busy, and then I forgot to call back. Or maybe I didn’t actually forget. Maybe I even thought about it but blew it off in my teenager eagerness to hit the road. That early fall morning in 1956, all this nineteen-year-old could think about was revving up my incredible new car and rocketing across the San Joaquin Valley to Del Monte Forest where the Pebble Beach Road Races would be held that weekend. Thought about calling back. Didn’t think about it. No matter. Whichever way, I never did accomplish my intended conversation with J. Brooke Lamkin, Insuror, to get coverage on that incredible new car.

Much to my regret.

I had spent the summer working fiendishly in the suffocating heat and talcum-like dust of Huron, California, sprinting back and forth to build a warehouse-sized mountain of empty wooden crates that would soon be snatched away by melon packers whose fast hands would with watchmakers’ precision fit precisely 27 or 36 or 45 or 54 evenly-matched canteloupes in each one. In less than a minute. Each one would pack out hundreds of crates a day, and there were dozens of packers. Our frantic effort to build a backlog of crates and then stay ahead of their depleting our inventory made each endless day a marathon competition between production and exhaustion.

It had been the hardest, dirtiest, most painful work I had ever done, including my summer at age fourteen as a day-laborer with a shovel digging new-house foundations in the brutal 100-degree August sun of Fresno. At least that summer I got to sleep at home after a long cool shower, rather than curled up for a few hours in my car in Huron soaked with sweat that had turned the dust on my body into fine abrasive mud, the better to chafe my inner thighs raw again the next day.

But it was all worth it. Each hateful day in Huron I mentally transported myself above the grimy toil into a heavenly reverie in which I was driving the new convertible that would be my reward for all this travail. I spend sixty minutes of each hour fantacizing about what kind of car I would buy and how I would feel cruising the streets of Fresno and the lanes of the campus in it. And how lovely it would be to pick up my date in it on a warm evening and head up the road to Millerton Lake for a picnic and a sail, my favorite way to entertain a young lady in nice weather. Oh, surely all this pain would be worth it.

By summer’s end, I had made a pretty good bundle of money and began calculating just what kind of car I might be able to afford. I had already owned, at nineteen, perhaps a dozen or more different cars. We used to buy them and mess with them and then sell them again within weeks or months. After souping up the engine, or painting the car, or tranforming a sedan into a convertible by simply cutting the top off with a hacksaw, which could be done in an hour or so. The latter transformation left the side doors a bit unstable, flapping loosely in search of the latches which were now meandering unpredictably on a side panels that had lost their structural integrity when deprived of a link to the now-missing steel top. Fixing up (or sometimes fixing down) cars from the ‘30s and early ‘40s and then horse-trading them was a primary entertainment for kids like us, and I was proud of the fact that I made money on every car I had and sold right up the day I was married—some twenty-three of them, if memory serves.

Well, that doesn’t count the one I lost completely.

I took my fistful of gritty cash at the end of the summer and headed for Los Angeles, home of all things “car”. In particular, it was the home of the speed shop run by Bud Hand, a semi-legendary builder of race cars and racing engines. I had seen and heard some of his engines producing extraordinary power in sports cars blasting ahead of the pack on race courses at Pebble Beach and Santa Barbara. Maybe, just maybe, I could find a way to get my hands on a Hand-made car. It was worth a shot.

I drove away from his shop in a 1952 MG TD. Yellow. Tan leather upholstery. And hot!

This was not your basic early MG whose little engine put out a sewing-machine-like fifty horsepower. No, Hand had build this baby to show its rear bumper to every other MG on the road or race track. The body had been streamlined by removing the lovely clamshell fenders and replacing them with close-fitting motorcycle fenders that hugged the front wheels and turned with them. In a quest to make the car as light as possible, he had even cut holes in the chassis and other places to reduce the overall weight, and he removed other non-essentials that added unwanted pounds.

But the heart of his work was the engine. Oh, God, what an engine. It was “full-race”, meaning that everything conceivable had been done to increase its horsepower to the max. Bored, stroked, blueprinted, hot ignition, racing cam, big-capacity carburetors, shot-peened connecting rods. The works. This engine would whip up to nearly 9,000 RPM in an instant, an almost-unheard of spin rate anywhere but under the hood of a Ferrari.

Bud Hand’s engines were known for their indestructibility, as well. This was because, as he put it, “I test-run ‘em until they puke.” Hand had a particularly well-honed way to get an engine to puke. In the middle of the night when the California Highway Patrol officers were presumably home in bed or sipping coffee in an all-night diner, Hand would head out onto Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles at the wheel of some car he’d just built an engine for. Because he had a deformity in his right leg and foot that made sustained pressure on the accelerator difficult for him, he’d bring along a heavy dictionary. He’d get the car up to speed in a middle gear, dump the dictionary on the gas pedal to keep it mashed to the floor, and steer the thing down Olympic with the engine screaming like a banshee at maximum RPM until it just plain blew up.

Hand would glide to a rest at the side of the road where one of his employees who had been following him along with a tow truck would pull up in front of him, back up just in front of the busted car leaking water from a cracked block or frozen up with a broken con rod or whatever, hoist it up, and drag it back to the shop.

Next morning, Hand and his crew would tear the engine down to find out what broke. Connecting rod on a piston? Okay, intensify the shot-peening to harden it even more. Valve? Find some new ones with a higher proportion of chromium in the steel to better stand the pounding they take. Overheated? Rip out the radiator and replace it with a larger one, or maybe install a cooler to run the engine oil through. Step by step, they re-worked the car until they simply couldn’t break it any more.

Then they’d turn it over to somebody like me to find new ways to break it.

I didn’t disappoint them.

Less than a week after I got my hands on my hot-rodded MG, I wrecked it.

Totally.

My buddy Greg and I had blown out of Fresno headed for Pebble Beach, itching for the twisty roads over the Coast Range mountains that separated the flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley from the lush Monterey coastline. The sharp curves in those rural roads offered lots of opportunities to push the limits of adhesion and tippability as we flung the little MG around tight turns and then powered up again to send us hurtling away before hard-braking into the next one. On super-sharp turns, Greg would yank on the parking brake momentarily just as we entered the apex of the curve, to lock the rear wheels for a sideways slide that sharpened the angle of the car’s turn so we could then accelerate flat-out toward the next twist in the road.

As the tight twists in the road subsided and we caught up with some traffic on the flats through an orchard down the western slope of the mountain, we slid into a closely linked chain of cars on a narrow two-lane road. We were all bunched up like a pack of NASCAR racers, looking for chances to pass.

Suddenly the car in front of me swerved violently over onto the shoulder and I instantly saw why: another car was stopped dead in our lane right ahead, waiting for a chance to turn left across oncoming traffic into a fruit stand. I was bearing down on it at seventy-five and it was coming up fast. I hit the brakes and planned to bail out onto the shoulder like the car just ahead of me had done, but my brakes were too good. Beefed up for racing, they grabbed hard—slowing me faster than the car just behind me could slow down, so he swerved onto the shoulder to avoid hitting me and now was right beside me, blocking my own escape route around the stopped car that was…

Whang!

We were probably doing fifty when we blasted into the stopped car.

The next thing I knew Greg and I were sitting in the dirt parking area of the fruit stand, a small cloud of dust settling over us from our spinning stop. I couldn’t breathe—the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t think. What happened. I turned to Greg and saw his head covered in blood, but when I tried to ask him if he was okay my tongue wouldn’t work. It had split open on the steering wheel. Blood was gushing from my mouth and from my chin which had also split open.

By the time the ambulance from Hollister got there twenty minutes later, we were both out of the wreckage, leaning against the crumpled mass that used to be my ’52 MG TD. I guess the CHP was there, too, writing up an accident report. I don’t really remember. I vaguely remember seeing the wreckage of the car I had hit, across the road at the edge of a field.

If you’re going to be in a wreck, pick something other than a ’52 MG TD. With no seat belts or airbags—they hadn’t yet been invented for passenger cars—and precious little “crumple zone” protection, the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving. Greg and I had both been flung forward with terrific velocity, splattering ourselves against the windshield, dashboard, steering wheel, and—in my case—also the brake pedal which I was standing on so hard it shattered my ankle upon impact.

Between us, we had that fractured ankle, a fractured skull (Greg), a cracked sternum (me), and sixty-six stitches. Six of those stitches were in my tongue, laced without benefit of anesthetic which, the surgeon had said, would be largely ineffectual given the gusher of blood coming from my split tongue.. I remember his saying, “I can try the anesthetic if you want me to, but trust me, your tongue’s bleeding so fast it would wash out the numbing agent before it can work. I’ll try the anesthetic if you insist, but I’m afraid it’ll just be that many more times you have to feel me stick a needle in your tongue.”

Now, everybody knows how much fun it is to accidentally bite your tongue. Hurts like holy hell for a couple of minutes, then mercifully fades away. Well, I can attest to the fact that if you ever have occasion to have someone stick a stitching needle through both sides of a split tongue—six stitches times one entry for each side of the split, or twelve piercings total—you will remember it vividly for the rest of your life.

And you will always ever after wear a seat belt.

In sum, the whole thing was a personal disaster. I lost my totally-destroyed car and, equally painful, lost any justification for ever having endured that hideous summer of melon-crate hell in Huron. Because I had failed to complete my phone call to J. Brooke Lamkin, Insuror, not only did I lose my investment in the car—I also had to pay for the repair of the car that I hit, out of my own pocket. And the hospital bills, too, since health insurance hadn’t quite been invented in the mid-fifties.

So I needed lots of money, just to break even again. Once I got off crutches and could walk on my fractured ankle, I took a job working the loathesome midnight-to-8AM shift at a big commercial bakery in Fresno, churning out loaves of Wonder Bread and hamburger buns by the thousand every night. The atmosphere was ugly, with arguments and fistfights breaking out between workers frequently, triggered by the tiniest apparent or imagined provocation. During those middle-of-the-night hours, people just seem to be awfully testy. Maybe they are feeling sorry for themselves that they have to work such crummy hours, and maybe they are pretty sleep-deprived, to boot. That was certainly true for me. Because I was going to college full-time during the day, I myself was sleeping only a few hours out of each twenty-four, grabbing cat naps between classes or right before dinner or just after dinner. As a result, the next six months became a groggy blur of exhaustion, frustration, and anger.

The anger was at myself, of course. I had been taught a lesson. A very, very painful lesson. And I learned it well. It hit home particularly hard because I knew for an absolute certainty that I had nobody to blame for my plight except myself. And I knew that I would never, never, never ever again fail to secure proper insurance on anything I owned or operated. I’m not paranoid about many things, but if I ever compile a list, this one has a lock on Numero Uno.

There is little doubt that my current insurance agent falls asleep at night dreaming of a whole roster of clients and prospects who might be such a soft touch.

Anybody Can Change—Eventually

NON-VERBAL PROMPTS ARE FINE, TOO

The postcard from The First Presbyterian Church of Princeton to Patti read: “You are one of the elders who will be serving communion this Sunday. Please come to the Assembly Room promptly at 10:15AM for rehearsal. Attire: dark suit, white dress shirt, and conservative necktie.”

Electing women as church elders was a new experience for most denominations in the 1960s, and Patti was among the very first asked to serve in this leadership capacity. And so with faux devotion to the male-oriented instruction, she did exactly as she was asked.

Come Sunday morning, Patti, who stands 5’2” and weighs 112 pounds, presented herself in the Assembly Room at 10:15AM dressed in one of my size-46 dark blue pinstripe suits, a starched white dress shirt with a 17” collar and 35” sleeves, and a dark blue silk tie with tiny maroon polka-dots. Her trim little body was fairly buried under sagging billows of fabric from this suit and shirt tailored to my 210 pounds. She looked just like Charlie Chaplin minus the mustache and top hat. The pants cuffs, even though rolled up, still dragged on the floor as though she were mushing through deep snow. The oversized collar wobbled around her slim neck like a hoola hoop on a ballerina. When she fished her hands out from under the sleeves to clasp them in front of her, the sleeves bunched up like corrugated stovepipe from wrist to shoulder. When she released her hands, the sleeves fell straight away toward her knees, looking more like pant legs than sleeves.

Friends and I variously crouched or stood tip-toe as we jockeyed around to stack our heads atop one another’s so we could sneak a peek through a tiny crack we opened in the Assembly Room door. We were silly with anticipation of the group’s reaction to Patti’s “statement”, her not-so-subtle suggestion that future instructions just might move beyond a male-chauvinist orientation. We all awaited the moment when someone would comment to her on her attire, giving her the opening to respond with facetious wide-eyed innocence, “Why, I’m just doing what the postcard requested,” whereupon a good laugh would be had by all and the point would be made.

So we held our breaths and got ready for the reaction which would surely be instantaneous. It was quick in coming alright. Just not the way we expected.

Nobody said anything.

When someone would catch a glimpse of Patti they would instantly swing their head away as though they had accidentally caught her squatting on a toilet or something. One after another, all two dozen elders soon had had their own glimpse and found something else—anything else—in the room to look at instead. Someone else—anyone else—in the room to chat with. No one said anything to her for an eternity as they milled around waiting for the rehearsal to commence. Nothing. Not a single word. She circulated among her fellow elders amiably, clearly a candidate for casual conversation, but no one engaged her. Not even the senior minister who by now had seen the outlandish attire of this clearly deranged young woman who never should have been elected an elder, that’s for sure.

After rehearsal, the elders were to file into the church sanctuary like Noah’s charges, two by two. Patti was prearranged to walk side by side with Dorothy, a tall, dignified older woman who was the only other female elder serving. As the person most in danger of being infected with whatever possessed Patti, Dorothy eventually succumbed to her need to gently probe this excruciating gaffe.

She finally sidled over and innocently asked Patti, all swathed in bunched-up, overlapping folds of fabric, “Are you feeling cold, dear?”

“No,” chirped Patti pleasantly in reply, and elaborated no further on why she might be so ridiculously clad.

The rehearsal took place unremarkably. Patti shuffled through her paces along with the others as they determined who would pass the bread and who would pass the wine and how they would transfer the plates from minister to elder and back to minister again and who would serve which section of the pews and who would carry the communion elements up to the choir in the loft. All the arrangements were made clear and, guided by markings on the floor laid down for the rehearsal, they walked through their paces to ensure that everything was honed to flow “decently and in order” as Presbyterians are wont to say.

Rehearsal completed, they lined up two by two for their march into the sanctuary to commence the 11:00AM worship service. Dorothy took her uneasy place beside Patti, leaving a little more distance than necessary between them, casting furtive sidelong glances down at this heap of blue pinstripe that sheltered a woman the top of whose head was visible somewhere inside the rippled cowl of fabric piled on her shoulders. No one else in the parade dared chance a glance her way, as if by staring steadily enough at the back of the head in front of them they could make this hideous apparition disappear.

One minute to go. Patti unobtrusively took a sideways step out of line to give herself some elbow room and deftly shed the suit and shirt and tie, all of which fell readily away from her slim frame in seconds. Suddenly she was transformed into an attractive young matron in a properly Presbyterian dress, ready to lend dignity to the impending service of holy communion. Dorothy, who watched this miracle with jaw agape, looked as though she might swoon and sag to the floor as she gushed in a torrential whisper, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh, you look soooooooooooooo nice!”

Nobody ever said another thing about it.

But nobody had to. The next time she got such a postcard, it read: “Attire for men: dark suit, white dress shirt and conservative tie. Women will wear appropriate attire.”

FOOLS RUSH IN

When Martha Lou announced her retirement as Director of Christian Education, I saw an opportunity to re-conceptualize how we go about the business of passing along the faith to younger generations. From time immemorial, the transmission of what we believe and why we believe it has been carried from parent to child and from church-school teacher to pupil. The parents were whoever the parents were, and what they believed and what they taught their children was beyond the immediate scope of my responsibility as the staff minister at the church responsible for all the educational programs, among other things. But I did feel fully accountable for what children were taught when they attended the Sunday School classes at the church.

And my prior years’ experience as a chaplain and a teacher of religion at Middlebury College had taught me one thing: there was precious little “quality control” going on in Sunday Schools. Kids showed up in my classes and discussion groups as freshmen espousing a wild array of notions, conceptions, beliefs, facts, fallacies, and just plain nonsense about Christianity—all of which they had gleaned from well-intended lessons by well-intended volunteer Sunday School teachers who were simply all over the map in terms of what they taught.

And you can’t blame the teachers. Those of us who had the benefit of three years of graduate study in a theological seminary came away equipped with a fairly comprehensive understanding of the central elements of Christianity, and a fairly good sense of what cherished notions were not only false but actually misleading and even damnably contrary to the teachings of Jesus. One need not look far for examples of murder and mayhem committed in the name of Christianity. They are painfully abundant throughout history.

Among my students at Middlebury, you could tell which ones had suffered through a lot of Sunday School, and which ones went through their childhood and early teen years unscathed. These latter, on the doorstep of adulthood but religiously ignorant, were seizing on our college courses as an opportunity to see what this Christianity stuff was all about. Day after day, they were all but on the edge of their seats as we presented seminary-quality expositions of how the human community had come to certain realizations about our creation, and our sinfulness, and the value of someone like Jesus who could make it pretty clear what an authentic life as a child of God might look like. They were like an eager discovery party uncovering treasures in a wilderness, almost yelping for joy as some new understanding blossomed for them.

The kids who had done time in Sunday School were mired in consternation.

Faces scrunched up in confusion and dismay, they struggled to reconcile what they were hearing with what had been taught by the welter of Sunday School teachers they had encountered over the years. “Wait a minute,” they shouted inside their heads and sometimes out loud, “what do you mean that Moses never crossed the Red Sea?! That’s something I’ve learned from my very first day in Sunday School!”

So I would patiently explain that the Hebrew words that name the body of water Moses and his followers crossed to escape slavery in Egypt are “yam suph” which translates into “sea of reeds” or a broad area of marsh. Only speakers of English are deluded into thinking that he marched through an unlikely canyon of dry land miraculously riven into a body of water 3,600 feet deep. Thus deluded, because way back when, some typographer unwittingly left out the second “e” in reed, and ever since English bibles have aped his mistake. Thanks to the uncritical reading of folks like Cecil B. DeMille whose dramatic production of “The Ten Commandments” imprinted a fantastical image of the Red Sea splitting open for Moses, most Americans are stuck with one more roadblock to a credulous understanding of the roots of Christian faith.

Much of my time as a teacher and a counselor at Middlebury was helping these kids reconcile their long-held misbeliefs with a more intellectually respectable grasp of their religious roots which would ultimately enable a more whole-hearted embrace of their faith, enabling them to “believe” without the undertow of having to accept God’s occasionally overturning the laws of physics to make a point. I came to think that maybe the less Sunday School, the better.

Doing away with it wasn’t a viable strategy to propose to The First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, however. So I came up with a plan that I thought might be the next best thing. What if, I proposed, we not spend Martha Lou’s salary on a new Director of Christian Education. What if, instead, we broke it up into a number of smaller salaries for part-time professional Sunday School teachers?

What? Pay our Sunday School teachers?! Heretical!

Well, wait a minute, I replied. We pay ourselves to assure professional leadership to the adults in worship. We pay our janitors to keep the building clean. We even occasionally pay a professional musician to augment the sound of our choir. Why wouldn’t we consider professionalizing the teaching of our young children, to ensure that their earliest understanding of Christianity is something they can grow with into adulthood without fear of contradiction?

Much mulling ensued. When the mulling was over, I was given a go-ahead to launch my plan as an “experiment”. Not every community could have done what we were able to do, because not every community is fortunate enough to have a major university and a major theological seminary and a major choir college all within a mile of each other—and the church. The community that congregates around such institutions inevitably includes many who have had superb educations in many disciplines—including religion—whose knowledge is underutilized as they busy themselves with other pursuits like raising children. Pursuits that are flexible enough to admit, say, a ten-hour per week professional commitment to plan and execute a world-class, age-appropriate lesson about the Christian faith.

In relatively short order, we identified and recruited half a dozen such people, several of whom actually had seminary degrees. The were thrilled at the prospect of joining in this experiment.

Then it was time to deal with the miseducation going on at home. It would do no good to make the Sunday School lessons impeccable if the child went home to parents whose own theological understanding was a dog’s breakfast of leftover scraps imparted by their own ill-informed volunteer Sunday School teachers of yore. The kids needed parents whose own Christian education would keep pace with that of their children, and the best way to do that was to bring the parents themselves into the classroom with their own young children.

So our model for the experiment took shape and came into being. Each class had a professionally trained teacher whose theological education was up to snuff. And each parent served as a teacher’s aide for one month during the school year. On the first Saturday of each month, teachers and the parents serving with them for that month, gathered together to work with a professor of Christian educator from Princeton Theological Seminary. The professor led them through the lesson theme for that week, providing them with a thorough grounding in both the theology and the elements of that theology that were appropriate to introduce to children of the various ages in our Sunday School.

All the players were in place. The planning had gone wonderfully well. I wish I could say the same for the way I introduced the program to the congregation.

Beware the press. And beware your own ego. Neither will serve you well if there are other egos that might be abraded by your great innovation.

Somehow the local paper got wind of the radical overhaul I was doing to our Christian education program and they wanted an interview. I foolishly acceded to their request. We had a lively conversation in which I explained why we were doing this and how it was to be structured. Yes, by golly this was a much, much better mousetrap.

That’s how the story came out. Even worse, it came out in the paper before I had a chance to announce the program to the congregation myself. Meaning, most of the congregation learned about their new Christian education program through the lens of an eager reporter who was only too happy to reflect and even exaggerate my incautious criticism of the old mousetrap. The article came off as monumentally contemptuous of every Sunday School teacher who had ever labored in good faith to nurture the shoots of Christian belief in our little cherubs.

Trouble was, about half of the members of The First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, had at one time or another been pressed into service as a Sunday School teacher. And so approximately nine hundred of them were really insulted, in fact royally pissed off, at this smartass young know-it-all who had the temerity to declare their years of unselfish, dedicated service to the church school all for naught. Add in their sympathetic spouses, and I had made enemies of just about all of them.

Phone lines all over Princeton melted from the heated vitriol whipping around from one household to another, stimulating hastily organized coffee klatches where raucous indignation shook the room. All this fury was dumped unceremoniously on Don, the senior minister, demanding everything from my immediate removal to the rescinding of this outrageous experiment. Princeton people would never actually lynch someone, but tar and feathers seemed to be a real option, given its historical respectability.

There are screw-ups, and then there are screw-ups. I had perpetrated a real, honest-to-God, world-class screw up.

The only good thing about being a person who screws up is that you get pretty sanguine about going to people and apologizing. I have had so much experience in apologizing to people that it’s not only easy for me—it actually feels very good. It’s not as if I don’t know that I screwed up. And it’s not as if I don’t feel really, really bad about ever making another person feel bad about themselves. There is nothing, in fact, that I hate more than that. My hope is that every encounter I ever have with another person will leave them somehow better off, and certainly no worse off.

So I felt no dread when I took to the pulpit the following Sunday to declare what I truly believed—that every person who had ever served in the Sunday School had made a contribution to the development of the Christian faith of their young charges. And that they were to be appreciated and applauded for that.

But I didn’t back off on my conviction that there might be an even better way to pursue our goals in Christian education and that we in Princeton were uniquely blessed with resources that might enable us to take a different approach unavailable to others. And that in taking it, we might even uncover some enhancements that communities lacking Princeton’s unique resources could emulate. I described the design for the new program and how it might improve the Christian education of our young, and might contribute to new possibilities for others. We had an obligation, I insisted, to strive for that.

I think I carried the day because I was sincere in what I said. Both what I said about valuing their past efforts, and the potential value of innovation. If I had been disingenuous about the former, the show would have been over. If I had been excessively confident about the wonderfulness of my new program, that would have been a death knell as well. But the congregation caught just enough of the excitement of new possibilities that they were able to tentatively sign on—at least for a look-see.

And Don, their longtime, beloved, and trusted senior minister was once again heroic in his support for my experimentation. As he had several times before when I initiated eyebrow-raising innovations, he assured the congregation in his own quiet, comforting manner that his hand was firmly on the wheel and he would ensure that this radical young associate’s experiments not drive the church into peril. No one agitating for change in a prideful and tradition-bound organization could ever have asked for more generous or skillful support from on high.

The program launched just as designed. There was some push-back from parents who were uncomfortable with the idea of their inclusion as teachers’ aides and the time or effort that entailed, but we were adamant about their participation. If you want your child in this program, you will serve, too. Once they understood that we were serious about this and would not take “no” for an answer, all but one or two came around—and came to understand.

It is unsatisfying to conclude this story with an inconclusive report of how the experiment turned out. The first year was everything that I had hoped and dreamed it would be, but I left my position at the church and we left town at the end of that year to join Fred Rogers in producing “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”. I lost track of further developments in the program, and by the time I looked back in on it everything had changed. There was a new senior minister, the rest of the staff had turned over, and the program was gone. It was back to status quo ante.

Whether this was because it was formally evaluated and declared a failure, or whether in a time of leaderlessness the congregation simply reverted to a default position that was more familiar to them and required less intense care-and-feeding, I just don’t know. It’s not for lack of trying. I didn’t want to end this chapter this way. But my recent inquiries of those most deeply involved in this matter—some forty years ago—proved unfruitful. Some of them, in fact, are now enjoying the fruits of their Christian labors in the immediate company of their Lord. Not readily available to interview.

But then, this piece was never about Sunday School innovations anyhow. It’s about how not to bring about change—a lesson that has served me well ever since.

ONLY ONE CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION

If the first time you ever encountered Santa Claus, he gave you a really painful pinch, you would have been highly disinclined to get cozy with the old geezer again. Although he might have been well known for his apparent generosity, dropping off gifts to make other kids giddy on Christmas morning, you’d never trust him yourself. You’d find some other way to get the goodies. That first impression, even if inadvertent, would last a long, long time.

That’s true for grown-ups, too. And a painful first impression can damage or even destroy what might have been a mutually beneficial relationship. I saw that happen with a small business I recently came to know and admire. They suffered nearly lethal damage by inadvertently letting the press create first impressions of its product and itself—impressions that, in the media’s zeal for sensationalism, were extraordinarily negative.

After ten years and more than one hundred million dollars of R&D investment, a fledgling company called Aspect Medical Systems, Inc., was ready in 1997 to go to market with a remarkable innovation. They had developed extraordinary expertise in brain function and new technology enabling them to track the level of consciousness of the human brain. Ultimately, they had devised a brain monitor that would tell an anesthesiologist exactly how conscious or unconscious their anesthetized patient was at any given moment.

You might be wondering, “Don’t anesthetists know that already? People have been giving anesthetics to surgical patients for a hundred years. What have they been doing, guessing?!”

Well, in a way, yes. An educated guess, to be sure. But still a guess. Until Aspect’s brain monitor came along, the anesthetist relied on secondary indications that sometimes correlated with their level of consciousness, but other times did not. Changes in a patient’s blood pressure, a patient’s movement on the operating table, and other observable events might suggest that they were coming to consciousness—what is known as “intraoperative awareness”—but might also be caused by other factors. Similarly, they watched the patient closely for indicators that the anesthetic dosage was excessive, and the patient was being driven too deeply into unconsciousness. The clinicians relied on these secondary signs because they were the best indicators they had to work with.
But nothing directly measured the fluctuating status of the brain, the very seat of human consciousness, which was after all the organ in the body that their anesthetic drugs were intended to affect. And so Aspect created a high-tech monitor, which they called “BIS”, that was in effect an altimeter of consciousness. By reading brain-wave signals (called EEG, for electroencephalogram) through a Band-Aid-like strip of sensors across the patient’s forehead, the BIS instrument computed and produced a number between zero and one hundred that indicated the patient’s level of consciousness. At zero, the sensors were detecting no electrical activity, meaning the patient was as unconscious as it is possible to be. At one hundred, the patient was fully, completely conscious—as wide awake as one can ever be.

After jumping through all the FDA hoops and other prerequisites to selling a new medical device, Aspect was ready to bring BIS to market. Typically, there are two vehicles for introducing a new product—advertising, and public relations. Advertising is a great medium because you can say exactly what you want to say in your print ad or commercial on radio or TV. You control the appearance, sound, content, nuance—everything. What is more, you can target your advertising to precisely the people you want to pay attention to your news. If you’re after twenty-somethings with a new fashion item, you’d use People magazine and MTV. For a medical device, on the other hand, you’d place ads in the professional journals read by your target audience.

The downside of ads is that they cost money. Lots of money. Lots and lots of money. Ads have to have a home. They don’t float in free space. You have to buy a page in a magazine or buy time on the air that will be occupied by your ad or commercial, and somebody wants compensation for providing it. And you have to pay for it over and over again, to get plenty of repeated reinforcement of your fleeting message.

By contrast, the use of public relations—getting the press to cover your story and tell it to the public through the editorial content of magazines and electronic media—is relatively inexpensive. If you have a good enough story, you pay a PR consultant to “hook” the media on the story, and the media run with it. This is “free ink”—pages of words or minutes of TV time telling the world about your wonderful new product. Now, when a big company has a ho-hum “new-and-improved” version of a routine product—Tide, or Budweiser, or Chevrolet—they are unlikely to get much free ink. Such nominal tweaks on old standards are just not very newsworthy, even by the oftentimes minimal standards of what passes for “news” these days.

But a breakthrough product, something that may save lives or otherwise change things much for the better—something like BIS—is quickly seized on by media eager to hook and re-hook their own readers and viewers, to keep them engaged.

The downside to a PR-based approach is that someone else—the media folks—get to choose how they will tell the story. You tell it to them, and they re-tell it to their audience. Unlike an ad or commercial, you never have final say as to how it will come out. They pick and choose as they please.

Having burned through a hundred million dollars or more to perfect BIS’ ability to detect and display patients’ level of consciousness, the company had little left in the bank to spend on getting its story out. Certainly not enough to buy all the advertising space in professional journals that it would need, over and over again, to tell the complex and wonderful story of what BIS is and does. So they turned to PR.

The company put together a learned disquisition on what anesthesia is and how it works, and they held press briefings arranged by their PR firm. They told the press about what challenges anesthesia presents to the extraordinarily well-trained clinicians who practice anesthesia, and on how BIS could enhance their work. About how it could help reduce the amount of anesthetic drug required, since trials of BIS had revealed that many clinicians were actually using more than was necessary. By tracking the patient’s consciousness level on BIS, the clinician could adjust, or “titrate”, the amounts of drug more precisely and use less. Reduced amounts of drug meant that the patient might emerge from unconsciousness more rapidly, enabling them to exit the operating room sooner. And it might mean a briefer stay in the post-anesthesia care unit, or PACU, before being discharged to their hospital room or even to their own home. And it might mean less incidence of post-operative nausea and vomiting which is often precipitated by anesthetic drugs.

By now the PR agent is struggling to keep the attention of the media representatives whose eyes have glazed over with all this technical minutiae. They are not hooked. No real story here. Desultory questions from them reveal that the savings on drug costs might be a whole three or four dollars per case. Big deal. They start checking their watches and calculating how they can slip out of this press briefing in time to catch a quick drink on the way home. Until…

The story continues with one further benefit: BIS may reduce or preclude intraoperative awareness.

What’s that, they ask.

Well, the story continues, some patients wake up during surgery. During surgery, before they are supposed to.

What?! How could that happen? Tell us more about this, the media reps cry.

Okay. See, an anesthetic is really a cocktail of three different kinds of drugs. One is so the patient won’t feel pain. It’s called an analgesic. The second drug is called a paralytic, and its job is to paralyze the patient so they won’t move on the operating table. You don’t want them flinching or jumping around when the surgeon is making a tiny, delicate cut somewhere inside them. And the third drug is the one that takes away their consciousness. It’s called a hypnotic.

The job of the anesthetist is to keep all three of the drugs in balance, so each is doing what it’s supposed to do. But say one of the cylinders containing the hypnotic drug runs out, or the clinician just isn’t paying close enough attention, or for some other reason simply can’t tell that the patient is becoming conscious again. They just may not know. Anyhow, now the patient is lying there on the operating table and begins to hear everything that’s going on. They hear the chatter between the doctors and the nurses, the background music, the whirring of the machines. They are awake, but nobody knows it. This is the phenomenon called “intraoperative awareness”.

Why don’t the doctors know the patient is awake, comes the question. Why doesn’t the patient tell them?

Two reasons. First, because the patient has a breathing tube stuck down their throat that completely disables their voice box. And second, the patient is paralyzed, remember? They can’t move any part of their body, so they can’t wave or wiggle to give a signal that they’re awake. Oh, their eyes are taped shut, too, so they can’t even try to get somebody’s attention that way, either, by rolling their eyes or blinking fast.

Now the media reps are hooked and driving for the kill. Can the patient feel pain?

Well, that all depends on how adequate the analgesic drug is. If that has been allowed to slip, too, they may feel a little pain—or even, in the worst cases, feel everything. Some people who have suffered this experience describe hideous pain –“like a blowtorch in my stomach”—that lasted for the entire operation, which might have been several hours long. And, of course, they are driven nearly crazy by the inability to move a muscle or scream or do anything about it. It can be a living nightmare. The victims whose experiences were really bad later suffer from PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, that troubles them for many years afterward. Some are so badly traumatized that they refuse ever to see a doctor again, for fear of having another operation. Others sleep in a chair, they are so afraid of the bad dreams they have if they lie down again.

Stop the presses! We have a story!

But wait, wait—this intraoperative awareness doesn’t happen all that often, and hey! BIS is not just about heading off intraoperative awareness. It’s there to enhance the clinicians’ ability to tailor an exquisite anesthetic to each patient, so they get just what they need. We want this device to be understood as a tool with broad capacity to…

Yeah, yeah, sure. We’ll try to remember that. Some other time.

Off they fled to file their stories. Within hours, major media outlets—USA Today, ABC News, and others—were shouting the news that inattentive anesthetists were permitting their patients to suffer the unthinkable horror of intraoperative awareness, and that BIS was coming to the rescue.

There are about 35,000 anesthesiologists and about 60,000 certified registered nurse anesthetists, or CRNAs, in the United States. Unthinkably, their introduction to BIS—their all-important first impression of BIS—came from the sensation-mongering mass media.

This was a double whammy. The media not only too-narrowly defined the purpose of BIS—to prevent a rare but alarming condition called intraoperative awareness. Even worse, their screaming-headlines approach simultaneously humiliated anesthetists everywhere by telling 100,000,000 readers and viewers that they couldn’t trust these incompetent clinicians to keep them unconscious during surgery.

One chance to make a first impression. One chance. That’s all.

This worst-possible first impression was to damage Aspect for years to come. Not only did it misrepresent the product, BIS, and its true purpose. It also misrepresented the company, Aspect, by making it appear that its marketing strategy was to sell BIS by scaring patients into demanding that it be used to prevent their ever suffering intraoperative awareness. This felt like nothing short of extortion to many clinicians who then rose up in massive and vitriolic resistance, maintaining that they would never buy anything from a company so callous as to adopt such an unethical marketing strategy.

And, by the way, they said, we don’t think intraoperative awareness is any kind of a problem anyhow. So if that’s what your silly little machine does, I don’t need it. I’ve been in practice for thirty years and haven’t had a case yet.

Bad company, irrelevant product. Good bye and good riddance.

Tough to recover from an introduction as toxic as that one. Aspect’s sales representatives were rebuffed time after time. Doors slammed in their faces. Phone calls unanswered, unreturned, or rudely terminated. To some clinicians, they were pariahs, personae non grata in the hospital.

Bad as the situation was on the surface, it was even worse underneath.

The misimpression of the product and the misimpression of the company were compounded by the clinicians’ own misimpression of the incidence of intraoperative awareness. In surveys of the profession, most clinicians estimated that it may occur in, oh, what, about one in every 20,000, 30,000 patients? And they presumed somebody else—not they themselves—must be the anesthetist involved in such cases. Few believed that any patient of theirs, stretching over decades of practice, had ever experienced intraoperative awareness.

But well-validated studies have shown that about one in every seven hundred patients undergoing a general anesthetic actually has some experience of unintended intraoperative awareness. (The “unintended” is important, because in certain surgical situations some degree of awareness or moments of awareness are anticipated and even desired, including various orthopedic surgeries where mid-operation feedback from the patient is required.) So, the one-per-seven hundred unintended incidents means that a typical anesthetist might have several patients per year who wake up during the surgery when they are not supposed to, or dozens and dozens over the course of their career.

Why would they say they haven’t ever had a case, then?

Because they honestly don’t realize it. To begin with, anesthetists rarely confer with their patients after the operation, probing to determine whether the patient experienced any intraoperative awareness. For the most part, the moment the operation is over and the patient has recovered a measure of consciousness and responsiveness, the patient is spirited away to the post-anesthesia recovery unit where nurses coax them back to full stability before returning them to their hospital room. The anesthetist typically never sees the patient again. The de facto practice is, Don’t ask, Don’t tell. The anesthetist is the one who withholds the asking.

The “Don’t tell” part is where patients are complicit in the anesthetists’ underestimation of how frequently this event occurs. They underreport it for a variety of reasons. First, patients who do experience intraoperative awareness tend to doubt the validity of their own memory of the incident, finding it hard to believe, and so may not report it at all. Many who do report it never even caught the name of their anesthetist, so they report it to their surgeon who, being relatively oblivious to the phenomenon, often dismisses it as something the patient must have imagined or dreamed. For other patients, the recall of the incident doesn’t even form in their mind until weeks after they are discharged from the hospital, when the realization gradually dawns on them that something curious—or hideous—happened back there in the OR. Once again, self-doubt often deters their reporting it. Or worse. Some are so severely traumatized that they are driven deep into denial or adopt an intentional refusal to ever think or talk about it, lest they somehow experience the horror all over again.

As a result, many—even most—clinicians do not realize to this day that they personally are responsible for permitting intraoperative awareness to occur in their patients, and their estimates of the incidence profession-wide remain inaccurate. Consequently, even though peer-reviewed studies from multiple continents consistently reinforce the one-per-seven-hundred incidence and also show that BIS reduces that incidence by 80% or more, regular adoption for that use lags far behind what might be expected given the risks involved.

So did Aspect ever recover from such an inauspicious—no, from such a well-nigh lethal—introduction to its market? Yes. But not overnight. And not easily. But it had what it needed to recover, which was integrity and determination. And an innocent trust that truth will out, eventually.

I have worked with the senior management of scores of companies over the years. Great companies, with impeccable reputations and standards. Mayo Clinic and Johnson & Johnson spring immediately to mind. But none has ever surpassed what I saw at Aspect in terms of management commitment to doing the right thing, no matter what the cost.

Aspect knew that patients would benefit from BIS in the hands of clinicians who really “got it” about what this monitor could help them do—not just avoid intraoperative awareness, important as that was, but understand the effects of their anesthetics in a whole new way, tailoring the cocktail to the specific needs and real-time responses of each different patient. Aspect maintained that belief, even if the profession—their intended market—did not yet share their conviction. They were not about to abandon their mission, even though it was now clear that they were in for some mighty tough sledding.

And so they continued to invest in research studies and more research studies, spending millions they could ill afford, to support independent investigators testing out the uses and limits and weaknesses of BIS. When I first encountered the company, they were losing more than a million dollars a month—and merrily spending away on continuing research as though they had a bottomless reservoir of money rather than a fast-disappearing cash reserve. Over the next decade, the continuing research on BIS resulted in over two thousand publications describing what BIS could and could not do—many times more studies than any comparable device ever offered to the profession.

Resistance continued unabated for years, with the profession eager to believe that all this research must be tainted since so much of it had been funded by Aspect. Seemingly oblivious to the massive insult this bias leveled at their own colleagues who were conducting the research, many adamantly insisted that no research that relied in any way on Aspect’s money or loaned equipment could be considered valid. The data surely must have been corrupted to produce outcomes Aspect dictated. After all, isn’t that what a company like Aspect—willing to terrify poor gullible patients with horror stories of intraoperative awareness—isn’t that just what such rotten people would do?

Over time, the initial impression of Aspect twisted some clinicians into ridiculous contortions of resistance. Now it is true that some resistance is the natural by-product of any innovation. The very fact of the innovation inevitably implies that things could be done better. If you are proud of what you have already been doing, this comes as something of an insult. So some resented Aspect and rejected BIS because of that presumed affront, and that’s understandable.

But there was no accounting for the overall extent and ferocity of their reaction. After all, what the company was offering was pretty simple: an altimeter of consciousness, so anesthetists wouldn’t have to guesstimate based on secondary indicators. How complicated could that possibly be? What pilot, once the altimeter had been invented, would choose to fly without one just because they’d never had one before? Not anybody I’d want to fly with. There was something irrational going on here.

And I can tell you what it was. It even has a name. It’s called “The Ladder of Inference” phenomenon.

Imagine that you and I are sitting together in front of my fireplace, and I’m telling you this story. At one point, just for a fleeting moment, I notice you rolling your eyes. Even while I continue the story, another part of my brain starts taking itself up the rungs on the ladder of inference:

Rung #1: Snatch a datum. From all the possible data that I might have noticed about you—how you sipped your wine, how you crossed your legs, how you held your arm or how you smiled and nodded—I happened to notice you rolling your eyes. That’s the datum I’ll carry up to the next rung.

Rung #2: Interpret the datum: My interpretation is that when people roll their eyes, they are skeptical, or bored, or disrespectful. Aha! Let’s climb up a little farther.

Rung #3: Reach a conclusion based on my interpretation: You are stupid. Here I am busting my butt to tell you something very important, and telling it in as compelling a way as any human possibly could, and you are not interested. You are blowing me off. Yes, you are definitely stupid—terminally stupid. Let’s keep climbing.

Rung #4: Take an action based on my conclusion: Tomorrow, I will find someone with whom I can share my new insights about you. Oh, it won’t be gossip, really. Just a casual remark that lets my hearer understand how discerning a fellow I am, my having reached a level of perspicacity about your stupidity that my hearer has not yet attained.

Rung #5: Reinforce my conclusion at every opportunity: Hereinafter, I will notice only data about you that support and reinforce my conclusion that you are terminally stupid. If you ever give me the slightest chance to bolster my now-fondly-held conclusion, I’ll seize it. Heck, I’ll even invent evidence. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, only a stupid person would sip wine the way you do. I see that you’re holding the glass by wrapping your fingers around the crystal bowl, not by pinching the stem. Your fingers have traces of oil on them from the olives you’ve been nibbling. That leaves smudged fingerprints on the crystal which mask the clarity of the wine so that when you hold it up toward the fire you can’t see the extraordinary ruby hues of this expensive vintage I have served you glowing lustrously before the dancing flames. True connoisseurs know better and grip only the stem. Heathen! Not only stupid, but uncouth to boot. I’m sorry I wasted such a fine wine on you.

You might subsequently offer torrents of evidence of your brilliance and wonderfulness, but I will be blind and deaf to them. I do not enjoy the tension of cognitive dissonance, and since I’m already comfortably settled into my conclusion that you are stupid and uncouth, I’ll simply ignore anything that might put me to the trouble of rethinking that belief.

(By the way, the real reason you were rolling your eyes never occurred to me. One of your contact lenses had slipped out of position and you were trying to reposition it without interrupting my tale that you were actually enthralled by.)

That is the ladder of inference at work. Few phenomena of the human mind are more deeply rooted and consistent. And it’s not always destructive. We rely on it to trigger all kinds of conclusive thinking about repetitive behaviors that would otherwise exhaust us if we had to re-think them each time. When the light turns green, my foot automatically comes off the brake and onto the accelerator. I don’t think about that. Thankfully, the ladder of inference has long since seared that four-step linkage—data right up through action—into my mind. Our everyday behavior is facilitated in myriad ways by the ladder-of-inference process so we can apply our available thinking capacity to more interesting matters.

But it can also work against us, and against others. It worked against the anesthesia profession for half a decade before they collectively began to reassess the sufficiency of the initial datum on which they based their conclusions both about BIS as possibly more than an intraoperative-awareness prevention device, and about Aspect as an unethical terrorizer of patients.

Over time, the mounting research data that demonstrated the values of BIS prompted many to reconsider their earlier judgment, adopting the monitor even while still not yet quite convinced that Aspect was worthy of their patronage. Competitors came along offering their own version of a consciousness monitor, hoping to take advantage of lingering marketplace hostility toward Aspect. But their own clinical research was somewhere between paltry and non-existent, in comparison to the tidal waves of research with BIS, and clinicians are ultimately clinical—if the data aren’t there, they won’t follow. As a result, the competitors struggled to gain viable market share.

Aspect’s market introduction had been disastrously launched on a massive distortion, not of their own making, but they believed that the truth would eventually vindicate them. So they just kept investing in the discovery of more truth, and trusting that in time the profession would find their own respect for truth more compelling than their initial antipathy to the company.

As I write, more than 50% of the operating rooms in the United States are equipped with BIS monitors. The BIS market share is around 80-90%, with half a dozen competitors scrapping among themselves for the remains.

A lot of minds changed. Eventually.

EVEN TIRED CLICHES BEAR TRUTH

Okay, time to use a cliché to illustrate how hard it is to change a large organization.

You know the old cliché about the tanker ships. About how they can’t turn on a dime. Fully laden and under a head of steam, they turn ever so slowly and require a huge amount of sea room to complete a U-turn. With the helm over hard and full power applied, big ships require a mile of sea room to ease themselves around a half circle.

But captains don’t always have that much room, or that much time, to pull off a major change in course. Sometimes they suddenly find themselves in an untenable position—or even headed for disaster—and need to change direction right now.

Well, you might think, why don’t they just make an emergency stop. Then they can just spin around while dead in the water, swapping the bow for the stern, and head off in the new direction.

Good luck.

You need even more massive amounts of sea room just to bring one of these monsters to a full stop. A typical large tanker—say, 200,000 “deadweight tons” (the biggest are 650,000)—that’s chugging along at fifteen knots will need about 2.5 nautical miles to come to rest. Two and half miles.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that during this emergency stop, this monster vessel will be all but out of control. Those of us accustomed to anti-lock brakes in our cars pretty much take for granted that we can both slow down rapidly and maintain our steering. Without anti-lock brakes, the front wheels stop turning and thus lose their ability direct the vehicle. A skidding tire goes wherever the car pushes it, rather than leading the car where the driver intends. Anti-lock lets the wheels turn just enough to still steer the car while in a panic stop.

Not so, on a ship. You remember the dramatic moment in the movies where the captain, sheets of sweat coursing down his brow as he deals with some impending catastrophe, screams to the engine room, “Full speed astern! Full speed astern!”

That’s like us in the old days slamming on the car’s brakes, only to have them lock up and send us sliding in whatever direction the car’s momentum and the tilt of the slippery pavement felt like taking us. We just hung on for dear life and hoped the eventual crunch wouldn’t be too painful.

Pretty much the same for the tanker captain. He doesn’t have any brakes, of course, and so he has to use the ship’s propellers to do the opposite of what they have been doing—churn the water forward now, rather than backward. Got a blender on your kitchen counter? Think of it at high speed, and what’s going on inside that container. Now magnify it in your imagination to a churning mass of water that would fill your local community swimming pool. At full reverse on a huge tanker, the 36-foot-high propellers churn gulps of ocean twice the size of your house every second, creating a Niagara-like tumult of watery turmoil back there under the stern of the ship.

Suddenly the back end of the ship is fishtailing, basically out of control. Like you with your front wheels locked on your car, it’s going to go wherever it damned well pleases.

But, hey, they reverse the engines on an airplane when we land, don’t they? And the plane’s not out of control.

That’s because by the time the plane’s engines are reversed, it’s no longer flying. After touchdown on the runway, it’s just a very fast three-wheeled vehicle rolling along an airplane highway, coming to a stop. The little wheel up front is steering the plane, and the independently braked side wheels can also help steer. And that big tall slab that sticks up at the back of the plane—the rudder—is basically useless as the craft slows.

Rudders work only when something is flowing past them, and the faster the better. Something like air, or water. The push of the air or water on the rudder shoves the rear of the plane or the boat to the other side. Presto! Steering. But once the air or water flowing past them slows down or stops, they lose their ability to push the craft one way or another and, from that point on, the rudder is just along for the ride.

Underneath the stern of that big ship, the rudder is behind those propellers. When the ship was going forward, the propellers pushed a lot of water fast past the rudder, providing it with lots of power to direct the ship. But once those propellers reversed the flow, they just created a blender-like havoc around the rudder. It lost any influence on the ship’s course, and sheer momentum, wave action, wind, tide, and various other factors beyond the captain’s control accounted for most of the fate of the voyage from that point on.

Good description of the situation at AT&T in 1982.

It is hard to remember, even just twenty-odd years later, what a colossus AT&T was before the breakup announced in 1982 and commenced two years later. By any measure, it was the behemoth to end all behemoths. The biggest business in the entire world. Revenues of $136 billion—in 1982 dollars. A workforce of nearly one million employees. The largest fleet of commercial vehicles on earth. Products and services used daily by some 99% of American households.

That was the problem, of course. That 99% was the problem that led Judge Harold Greene to determine AT&T was tantamount to a monopoly on telephony and require it to be broken up.

And the sheer size and momentum of AT&T was the problem facing Charlie Brown, the CEO of AT&T at that fateful moment, in trying to bring about change in what would be left of AT&T once the spin-off of the seven “Baby Bell” local phone companies had taken place. It might not still be the 650,000-ton monster, but it was still a gigantic organization that was now headed in the wrong direction.

Why was the direction wrong?

This was the heyday of “deregulation”, when businesses and quasi-businesses like hospitals alike were being stripped of their previously impenetrable protection from the harsh competition of a free-for-all marketplace. Since time immemorial, certain protected organizations like AT&T, airlines, and hospitals had been guaranteed a particular share of customers, and often a particular amount of profit. Then, in a breathtakingly short period of time, these organizations that had relied forever on automatic success were flat-out naked in the street with a tin cup in their hands, begging for patrons and revenues. Naked in public. Everybody’s worst nightmare.

All of a sudden, nasty brutes who had never been sheltered before, who only knew how to make a buck by fighting for it and shoving away others who were after the same buck, came charging onto the scene. They could figure out how to make phones and string phone lines. They could start airlines and fly people around. They could start hospitals and get patients. Maybe even better than the guys who’d been doing it. And certainly with more aggressive, hell-bent-for-leather drive.

Aggressive drive? What’s that, the formerly regulated organizations wanted to know. It was a legitimate question. They had never needed it before, and so they became wonderful places of employment for folks who didn’t have much of it. Got a yen to charge around winning business in a hotly competitive environment? Guys like that sold insurance or cars or something. Looking for a comfortable place to do an honest day’s work without worrying about how you’re going to make your quota or meet the payroll? Head on over to the phone company or the post office or the hospital.

So AT&T was peopled with hundreds of thousands of farmers, and not a hunter in sight. Back to the movies. You remember, when the ranchers want to keep free range for their cattle but now some settlers have arrived and planted crops, all fenced in. The ranchers get riled up and ride on over there to rip up the fences them lily-livered, sissified farmers put up around their stupid vegetables or whatever. The farmer comes out in his overalls and whines a protest as the snarling cowboys laugh and gallop away, hooves tearing up the tender plants underfoot. The little woman comes out of hiding and asks, oh dear, oh dear, whatever will we do?

By 1984, the breakup had commenced, and things were not going well for AT&T. All the hot-tempered cowboys out there in the world of business had decided to ride over, trample their vegetable patch, and drive them out of the valley. Just up the Hudson River, IBM unlimbered its muscles to take on some of AT&T’s high-tech business. Upstarts like MCI and Sprint were hatching plans to snatch away the long-distance business. Even foreigners got in on the raid. Up in Canada, Northern Telecom decided it saw some easy pickings as a low-cost supplier of hardware to the Baby Bells.

Wait, wait. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Bad enough we have to fight off all these other guys. But the Baby Bells, these guys who were our business colleagues just moments ago and have been our best friends forever, they’re supposed to buy all their hardware from Western Electric, the manufacturing division Judge Greene let us keep along with the long-distance business and Bell Labs. Isn’t that what we talked about? Doesn’t loyalty count for anything any more?

Not if there are dollars involved. Here’s the price Northern Telecom is setting for a touch-tone unit, the babies said to Ma Bell. Beat that price, and we’ll talk turkey. Otherwise—sorry old pal, but you know, business is business. We’ve got our own bottom line to worry about now.

It was not a pretty sight. Actually, it was pretty ugly. The supertanker called AT&T, even when whittled down by 70% in size, still was saddled with the century-deep history, momentum, and DNA of a non-competitive mindset. Turn it into a lean, mean fighting machine? Not likely. The several hundred thousand employees who remained on the payroll of AT&T were simply not the right people to carry off such a dramatic overhaul of their own organization. They were farmers, not ranchers. They signed on at AT&T for a life of tending crops, not busting broncos and bulldogging rambunctious calves. The organization floundered around, despite the best efforts of senior management. And in the estimation of many, it has never since come close to recovering the vitality and promise that many imagined could spring forth from the assets that formed the core of the new AT&T in 1984.

One day in 1986 I called up Charlie Brown, then about to retire as Chairman and CEO, and asked if we spend some time together so I could learn from his experience. As we sat on his patio, I took him through what I was seeing happen at the not-for-profit hospitals we were working with. They, too, were struggling—suddenly thrown into competition with well-financed, expertly marketed for-profit hospital chains like HCA who were out to bury them. They, too, were staffed with people who were lovers, not fighters. None of them had anything remotely resembling a marketing department. Heck, they didn’t even know what “marketing” was.

I told Charlie that I saw them facing the same challenges that AT&T had been struggling with for the last three or four years, and I wondered if Charlie had learned any lessons that might be applicable to the hospitals. In his ever-modest and self-effacing way, Charlie looked a bit sheepish and replied, “I’m a little embarrassed that I never thought of the parallel before. I sit on the board of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, and, of course, they’re having a devil of a time with all the issues you describe—the very same issues that are making life hard at AT&T right now.”

So, knowing what you know now, I probed, what do you wish you had done more of, or less of, or earlier, or later, or not at all, or…?

“Two things,” he replied without hesitation. “First, we needed more training of our people. Much more training. Much, much more training. I was too slow to recognize how profoundly the world had changed for us, and how terribly far behind the curve all the rest of the company was, too. We didn’t have a clue.”

How much training, I wondered.

“Let me put it this way. In a situation where you have to change both the thinking and the behavior of an entire company—especially one with the history and inertia of AT&T—and change it as radically as we needed to, well, there’s just no such thing as too much.”

Like, how much?

I’ll never forget what he answered: “Take however much training you can imagine. Go ahead. Just let your imagination run wild. Let yourself go, wherever that takes you, no matter how many hours or days you are thinking of. Now, multiply that number by ten. Ten. That might, just might, bring you somewhere close to how much.”

Charlie was not a radical man, and I was surprised to hear such over-the-top thinking coming from him. But then I remembered an old axiom: The only thing worse than spending a fortune to train your people and then having them leave the company, is not training them and having them stay.

So you think that would have made all the difference?

“No,” he replied, “I said there were two things. The second thing I should have done was to change the management team, and fast. We didn’t do that. We have always been loyal to a fault, and it just wasn’t our instinct to swap out the great people who have made AT&T great over the years.”

He paused, and then said firmly, “That was a mistake. A serious mistake.”

In what way, I asked. What would you have done differently?

“I would have recruited some high-powered heavy hitters from IBM, GE, P&G—all the most successful companies in highly competitive businesses. Tough, smart, aggressive people. People who knew how to win in contests where there are no holds barred. I would have put them in all kinds of key positions. And I would have given them free rein to totally overhaul the company,” he continued.

So you think they could have changed the course of the company.

“No. Not these guys. I just think that would have been the right first step. At the time I brought them in, I’d have told them, ‘Listen, you’re not going to last long here. A couple of years, at best. After that, the old guard will chew you up and spit you out. But don’t worry about it. I’m going to pay you very well, and when the end comes, I’ll send you away with paid-up annuities that will take care of you for a long time.’”

“See” he continued, “all I needed from them was to establish a beachhead. Just the first invasion, the first wave of troops. They would have gotten people thinking differently, rattled old assumptions, challenged people’s way of doing thing, even though they wouldn’t have changed much else.”

He went on to describe how, once the initial beachhead had been secured, the second wave of outside hires could advance farther inland. Their successors would begin to change systems and processes, putting into place the organizational changes that would simultaneously reinforce the new thinking about how to compete and execute the actions required make the company more successful in a competitive environment.

“I thought we could do what was needed in, maybe, a matter of months. Now I know it will take, what, ten years I guess. Maybe more.” He paused. “Probably more.”

When he was finished, he sounded very tired. He looked very tired. He was very tired, in fact. He had tackled the largest restructuring of a business organization in history. It had cost him dearly.

Charlie’s struggle to transform the farmers of AT&T into hard-riding, highly competitive rodeo performers lacked, by his own admission, some mission-critical initiatives. He is in good company. Few understand how deeply embedded are the elements that keep an organization headed in the direction that it has always gone. Unlike the captain of a ship who can, after all, single-handedly spin the rudder over hard to starboard and command full-speed-ahead to force it—absolutely force it—to complete a turn no matter how large and cumbersome the craft, the CEO and senior management of a company or an organization face a dramatically more complex task in redirecting their ship of state.

They have to change the corporate culture.

We hear a lot of chatter about “corporate culture”, but most of it peters out once someone has made a few observations about dress code and office architecture and a few other readily apparent but ultimately trivial features of the operation. The real nature and true complexity of corporate culture has been best described by Professor Edgar Schein of M.I.T., a leading guru on organizational complexity, learning, and development. Moving deep below the tip-of-the-iceberg corporate culture issues that anyone can see, he notes that daily behavior of people in organizations is based on certain learned, shared, tacit assumptions. These are the unwritten rules of the game. They don’t get talked about much, but they get communicated and reinforced every single day.

The operational values of the organization—as opposed to the espoused values articulated in official documents—are the ones that really determine behavior and outcomes. How are blame and credit apportioned, and how are they expressed? Are decisions rapid and sure-footed, or painfully attenuated and couched in protective contingencies that allow easy retreat? How is out-of-the-box thinking regarded—as a nuisance and disruption, or as the very lifeblood of the organization? Is teamwork and collaboration the norm, or is it every person for themselves? How much effort do members of a team with one set of cultural norms—you want the finance folks to be pretty buttoned up—get along with the creative thinkers in marketing and advertising, where the unconventional breakthrough idea that upsets the apple cart may propel dramatic new growth? Who gets promoted, and why?

You don’t change these things overnight, not even in a small organization. In a behemoth like AT&T, the best Charlie could have hoped to do on his watch was to flick the trim-tab and begin the change in course.

Trim tab? That’s the tiny rudder on the back of the big rudder that gets adjusted first. Even with power steering, the captain of a big tanker can’t just suddenly fling the rudder hard over to one side—tons of water are coursing down both sides of the hull past the rudder every second, doing their best to keep it aligned straight between them. It would be impossible to twist the rudder—as big as the side of a five-story building—against that flow.

Ever tried to open your car door against a really strong wind? Imagine if that wind had been a tidal wave of water instead. No way.

So big rudders have small rudders on them—the trim tabs—that offer less surface area, are easier to turn, and get turned first. Now, a lot of well-meaning people banter about trim tabs, apparently thinking that turning the trim tab to the right is the precursor to turning the big rudder to the right.

Wrong.

Trim tabs work precisely because they are a paradox. You turn them in the opposite direction. When the water pushes against the trim tab on the left, it has the effect of pushing the trim tab against the big rudder—to the right, just where you want the big rudder to be.

Jim Burke got the paradox just right when he became CEO of Johnson & Johnson in 1976. Nearly fifty years earlier, then-CEO Robert Wood Johnson II wrote a company “Credo” that stated the hierarchy of J&J’s values, beginning at the top with its commitment to those who use it products, then cascading down to its employees and management, the communities where J&J operates, and—dead last—the stockholders. This radical set of priorities had obviously served the company very well as it prospered magnificently for decades, but Jim sensed that some of the younger generation in J&J were indifferent to it, tempted to shoot for short-term gains to impress Wall Street, possibly at the expense of the customers who had come to trust J&J to put them first.

As a thirty-year veteran of J&J, Jim well knew that a drift away from the Credo was a drift toward mediocrity and eventual decay. But he was also wise enough to know that he didn’t have the power to shove the rudder hard enough to move 100,000 employees in one direction or another. So he trim-tabbed the master trim-tabbing of all time.

“Maybe it’s time to give up on this Credo thing,” he mused out loud. “After all, old Robert Wood Johnson II wrote the Credo a long time ago. Things were different then. Simpler. Less cut-throat competition. Less pressure from Wall Street to keep the share price high.”

So he issued a challenge: he instructed the entire company to meet in teams to take another look at the Credo and decide whether it was time to trash it and become just like everybody else.

You can already predict the outcome of their debates. They rose as one and shouted their devotion to the Credo, newly appreciative of exactly how it had contributed to their success in the marketplace and to their personal pride in their everyday work. No wonder his tenure as CEO was so incredibly successful.

This is not to say that Jim got it right and Charlie didn’t. Relatively speaking, Jim’s job was a slam-dunk. It is incomparably easier to remind people of what they already know and love than to teach old dogs new tricks. But the point of the paradox of the trim tab remains valid: sometimes you have to make a small feint one direction in order to create a massive movement in the other direction—the direction that you’d really rather go.