March 30, 2005 – Much to be Thankful For

March 30, 2005 – Much to be Thankful For

In the year our oldest daughter ME was born, the United States saw such public carnage as to make a nation weep. Before her second month of birth, ME’s young world saw the assassination of Martin Luther King at the black-owned Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. After a week of calm, all hell broke loose across the country as blacks rioted in major cities, including Washington DC. Time magazine for the week of April 19th report 5,117 fires, 1,928 homes and shops wrecked or ransacked, and 23,987 arrests throughout the nation. I was working two jobs at the time, one during the day at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and a second evening job at Montgomery Ward Department story in (TK), troubleshooting newly delivered television sets that failed to operate when shipped to customers.

When we thought some calm had been restored, another assassination shocked our psyche again. Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, presidential candidate and Democrat Senator from New York, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by a young Palestinian Sirhan B. Sirhan. Life as depicted in the evening news was becoming some bad thriller where the villain kept up this relentless pace of one frightening, nerve-racking atrocity after another and the viewer is left powerless to do anything about it. ME participated in the national grief, young and completely unaware as she was. On June 8th the 21-car funeral train carrying Robert Kennedy’s body from New York City, left Penn Station, en route to Union Station in Washington D.C. Four hours behind schedule, the train passed through Landover, Maryland and ME, my wife IM and me along with nearly everyone else in Landover, stood beside the track and paid our respects. The slain Senator’s body was in the last car.

The nation would endure one more shock on Sunday August 25th as rioting broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This was a spectacle My wife IM and I watched on our Black & White Montgomery Wards 19-in. television set in our apartment. By then ME had begun to scoot herself around our apartment in a walker. Between crawling and her walker, she had the run of the apartment and largely ignored IM and me as we watched the evening news for the latest developments in the riots and the outcome of the Democratic National Convention proceedings. ME thumb in mouth was a content little soul, with not a care in the world.

That fall, with ME now growing by leaps and bounds, the three of us explored Washington DC nearly every weekend, visiting most of the national monuments. There are pictures of ME at the Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson monuments, ME beside the reflecting pool, and ME before the National Air and Space Museum of Smithsonian. During the week I looked for employment, some way to get us back further west. One day in September I came across an employment ad for Collins Radio Company in Dallas, Texas. They needed technical writers and I applied. I did the initial interview and got a second one in Dallas. I flew out for the day landing at Love Field, then the major airport for the city. After spending a day at the Collins Radio facility on Arapaho Road, near the northern end of Richardson, Texas, I ended up with the job. Collins was going to move the three of us from Landover to Dallas.

In early October, a moving van came to our apartment and took what few large belongings we had acquired, loaded them up and headed for Dallas. ME, IM and me loaded up our two-door 1967 Buick Regal and headed southwest. It was the most enjoyable trip we ever made. ME was one of those babies you could take anywhere and she never complained. We stayed in Holiday Inns all along the way, stopping every 400 miles or so for the day. We started out on Interstate 66 and traveled to Interstate 81 south through Virginia to Knoxville, Tennessee, our first stop. The next day we drove the length of Tennessee exchanging Interstate 81 for Interstate 40 and ending up in Memphis. It was early afternoon when we stopped and we lounged about the motel waiting for dinner. From Memphis, we made our way through Little Rock, exchanging Interstate 40 for Interstate 30, which took us into Dallas. On arriving in Dallas, we spent the night at the Holiday Inn on the North Central Expressway—the fanciest of motels we had visited.

Our year and a half in Maryland was over. The nation had gone through a great social upheaval and it was hungry for something new. The nation elected Richard Nixon, ending a decade of rule by the Democrats. The great leaders for civil rights reform were buried. The leaders of the student revolt—the Chicago 8—were found guilty and sentence to prison and the nation seemed to have settled down and come to terms with its new self. The new president would extricate the nation from Viet Nam and the country would go back to being its self-indulgent self once more.

Thanksgiving 1968, just over a month after arriving in Dallas, we drove through rain, snow and icy roads the 600 miles from Dallas to El Paso to introduce ME to her grandparents and three aunties. She was an instant hit, though she was initially afraid of her grandfather. It was a Thanksgiving we had much to be thankful for.

March 28, 2005 – Spreading Goodwill

March 28, 2005 – Spreading Goodwill

On Sunday, I spoke to my dad and mom and learned that an organization called Reagan Ranch had sent them a VHS cassette of the ranch along with a request for a donation to their cause. My father has a new combination DVD-VCR device and he was having trouble getting the videocassette to play. My sister Y and her significant other P, a soldier stationed at an army base in the south—it has changed recently and I haven’t kept up—at my father’s request removed the DVD-VCR device and reinstalled the old VCR player-recorder that my father had used before. They reported that the old device would play the videocassette and my father made a mental note to view the video at some later time. This all took place as we began our phone conversation and I was getting a running commentary on the progress of the reinstallation. I asked my dad if he planned to send in a donation and he rightly recognized that this was yet another scam to extract what little retirement he and my mother had and no he wasn’t planning to contribute to their cause.

My sister’s boyfriend P is much like my father, probably more so than even I. Both men are shade-tree mechanics, who prefer to work on their own cars—in the case of P he also has an abiding affection for Harleys. P is also handy around the house and has an inherent love of being busy. My mom and Dad have a fruitless Mulberry tree in the yard that was overgrown. On one of his trips to visit my sister, P spent a good half-day trimming the tree back. Now he was fiddling with the VCR. When on duty, he’s flying in and out of trouble spots in the Middle East and Asia. He doesn’t talk much about his life in the service, preferring to isolate his world as a soldier and his life among the middle class, enjoying the normal life we all take for granted.

“What are your plans for the year,” I asked after we had dispensed with Reagan’s Ranch. “I want to take your mother and make the trip by bus to Mississippi (by which he meant Brooklyn),” he said. One reason was to get away from El Paso for a time, to see something new, to do something different. The two had made a train journey to Watertown, New York to visit the grave of their friend Charles Upton in June last year. The trip had been therapeutic for both of them: the increased level of activity, confronting new surroundings, solving different problems from those that have become routine around their house, all had been invigorating. The trip to Brooklyn, Mississippi stretches a total of 1186 miles along Interstate 20 through Dallas-Ft Worth and all the way across Louisiana to Jackson, Mississippi. There the journey heads south along Interstate 55, until Highway 84, west along 84 until it intersects Highway 41. There the trip turns south again on 41 and ends up in Brooklyn. In checking the Yahoo map for motels in and around Brooklyn, the closest Best Western is a few miles further south in the town of Wiggins, the Best Western Woodstone, $55 to $59 a night.

The old place that my father sold to his cousin is outside of Brooklyn along the Brooklyn-Janice Road, but that was not the reason for this trip. He still has aunts and uncles alive down there and he was hoping to find some pictures of his mother and grandmother among their collected memorabilia. I asked him if he had been in Brooklyn when he first hopped a freight heading west looking for work. No, he had hitchhiked up to Hattiesburg and caught the freight up their with the help of an old man also heading west by freight who befriended him. As soon as I asked the question he recalled that the two of them had found work in Texas City, Texas the scene of the massive explosion that killed 15 people and injured over 100 others on Wednesday March 23. He recalled taking a trip to Texas City, Texas in the Mid-1970s trying to find the swamp he and his older partner had spent months clearing with Caterpillar tractors, while working for an oil company construction contractor in the late 1930s. The refinery that exploded began production in 1934.

I asked him if he ever saw the old man who helped him after the two parted company in New Orleans when the Texas City job ended. My father had convinced the old man to buy a ticket and for the two of them to take the passenger train back to New Orleans, a journey of 360 miles. The old man who had yellow fever at the time finally agreed. And my father got the old man settled into his place in New Orleans, bought himself a car, and drove back to Brooklyn, a hundred mile trip. A few days after returning home, my dad came down with yellow fever and was treated by the doctor who had delivered him. The fever broke a few days after taking the quinine tablets the doctor prescribed. My dad saw the old man in New Orleans a few times thereafter when driving down to the Big Easy, but the trip he made after coming home from his service in the Army after the Second World War, the old man was no longer at his place and my dad never saw him again.

My father’s life has always contained good people who have provided him aid and assistance in time of need and he has returned the favor. His balance sheet of exchanged goodwill would be balanced pretty evenly if I were to judge.

March 27, 2005 – Birth of a Baby in The Late 1960s

March 27, 2005 – Birth of a Baby in The Late 1960s

In the winter of 1968 my wife “IM” and I welcomed our oldest daughter, “ME,” into our lives and we immediately learned what being parents meant, a 24-hour vigil for a tiny eight-pound bundle that required continuous attention. She came into the world in the most tumultuous times of the 20th Century. The country was bitterly divided over the Viet Nam War, The Civil Rights Movement had become a social juggernaut that would remake the social order of the South as well as most of America, and the nation was rushing toward a major economic change—spending on the military would begin to decline and a large percentage of the workforce—of which I was a part—that relied on government contracts would be looking for jobs.

We were a conventional family, father off to work every day, stay-at-home mom taking care of the newborn. “ME” was born in Prince George General Hospital in Cheverly Maryland on a Thursday in February. I had gotten a call from “IM” who had spent the day with our neighbor “JC” a gracious Brit who had married “AC”, an ex-Air Force enlisted man, while he was stationed in the UK. “AC” had gotten work at the Marriott Corp. and had risen into the management ranks. The couple had two boys. “IM” had called me at work—I was employed as a computer technician by Bendix Field Engineering Service and stationed at Goddard Space Flight Center on the Washington DC Beltway in Greenbelt, Maryland—around 3:00 PM Wednesday afternoon to tell me that her contractions were coming five minutes apart and that the doctor had said she should get to the hospital.

I drove home in a panic, chain-smoking Marlboros every mile of the way until I pulled into the parking lot of the Landover Garden Apartments where we lived. “JC” had brought “IM”s suitcase and other things she would need at the hospital down to her apartment on the ground floor. We lived on the second floor of the same block of apartments. As I came into the parking lot I pull into a space in front of “JCs” unit. Coming out of “JC”s apartment was “IM” followed by “JC” with her suitcase and overnight case. We loaded the car and I thanked “JC” profusely for all the help she had been and I headed for the hospital, slowly now with my fragile cargo. I had stopped smoking and was concentrating on getting us through the evening commute traffic. We made the trip in under 15 minutes and “IM” seemed to be handling the contractions without much distress. I pulled up in front of the hospital, found a wheelchair and wheeled her into the reception area. I parked “IM” at the reception desk and ran back for her belongings, which I left beside her as I made one final trip outside to park the car. It was going to be a long night and it wasn’t even 5:00 PM.

The admissions process seemed to take forever but we eventually got through and “IM” was wheeled up to the maternity ward. I kissed her once before she left and I wouldn’t see her again until after the birth. The view of child bearing back then was doctors and nurses handled the birthing process. The mother did what she was told and the husband chain-smoked in the waiting room, which was what I did and where I did it. As our first daughter came into the world, the U.S. Marines were fighting a bloody battle to retake the city of Hué from North Vietnamese units that swept into the city two weeks earlier. And the city of Saigon was under siege by a determined Vieg Cong insurgency. In Grenoble France, the ABC Television Network was broadcasting in color the Winter Olympics, the first time ever around the world.

Unknown to me as I wandered back and forth between the waiting room and the glass-enclosed nursery where each newborn baby was brought, “IM” and “ME” were going through hours of labor in their delicate dance of birth. As Wednesday’s midnight hour neared and prepared to give way to Thursday, I was beginning to grow anxious. The long hours of not knowing and no information as to what was going on was wearing on my spirit. I gave up the waiting room and posted myself outside the nursery and waited another hour before I saw a newborn being brought into the room all swaddled tightly in a white receiving blanket. My heart surged as I stood watching the new arrival being worked on by the nursery staff. My attention was interrupted by the sound of an approaching gurney and as I turned in the direction of the sound, I saw my exhausted wife “IM” being wheeled from delivery room to maternity ward. The gurney stopped where I was standing and I gave my wife a hug and kiss as the nursery staff brought “ME” over to the window for both of us to see.

The hospital staff interrupted the brief first reunion of our new family. “IM” and I said our goodbyes and we waved to our newly arrived daughter “ME”. I would remain at the window watching the nursery staff continue their work on the new addition to our family. “IM” would continue to the maternity ward where she would be prepared to receive and begin feeding our new daughter. I would wait for “IM’s” doctor to tell me the delivery was normal, that our new baby was fine, how much she weighed, and how long she was, that “IM” was fine and had no complications during the birth, that she would be able to leave in a couple of days. By the time he finished our brief conversation in the waiting room where he took me after coming out of the delivery room in his scrubs, I finally let out a sigh of relief. I would have to wait until the following day before I had a chance to hold our daughter. Such was the manner of childbirth in the late 1960s.

March 25, 2005 – The Journey to Roswell

March 25, 2005 – The Journey to Roswell

It’s Sunday July 26, 1999 and my wife “I” and I crawl out of bed at our condo in the Ft Marcy Inn in Santa Fe about mid-morning as I recall. The drive from Needles, California to Santa Fe, the day before had taken its toll. There is a feeling about a city like Santa Fe. It’s the same feeling I have about El Paso. It’s a place with its feet firmly in the past. I feel as if I’m living at some time in the past when I’m in most any Southwestern city. It’s strong in Santa Fe, perhaps because the city flaunts its early 20th century look and feel. If you replaced all the cars in the city with Model T’s you would be back in that era. What brings you into the modern world is radio and television beaming sights and sounds about what’s happening in major capital in the U.S. and abroad.

The first Sunday in Santa Fe, I enjoy that sense of venturing back in time. My wife “I” and I are walking from our Condo down to the city center. The feeling I get being in this place reminds me of being six years old again and my father has just brought my grandmother and me up from Mississippi to El Paso and I see the desert, the mountains, the buildings that look like something out of the old west. I was impressed as a six-year old. And today, it impresses me still but now because I’m venturing back in time revisiting the world I remembered as a young child. The other trappings of Santa Fe are the Indians making a living selling their wares to tourists on the sidewalks surrounding the plaza sitting in front of the Palace of the Governors. It’s a city block of green imprisoned on all sides by shops selling art—R.C. Gorman original works and prints abound, and souvenir shops selling every imaginable trinket to entice the tourist: howling coyotes with neckerchiefs, moccasins, the Indian god Cocopeli—the mythical musician and magician of Anasazi, Zuni, Hopi and Navajo Indians, knives, tee shirts, and jewelry—the one trinket my wife “I” cannot resist. We buy a Cocopeli and a ring in one of the stores then resume our slow amble around the Plaza allowing the stream of tourist making the same sojourn to carry us along.

After a leisurely time around the plaza, we catch some breakfast and make our way to the outlet shopping mall we passed on the way into town, trading travel by foot for travel by car. I buy a pair of ASICS running shoes, the only kind that fit my feet. I’ll break them in running the Paseo de Peralta, the circular road ringing the capital and city center in the days we’re in town. Once we have our fill of shopping we retire to the condo and spend the rest of the day reading. I’m beginning Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, by James Davidson.

The following Monday, “I” and I decided to drive to Roswell. We were once, both into UFO lore, reading just about all the books that had good UFO stories including Incident at Exeter and The Interrupted Journey by John G. Fuller and Passport to Magonia: On Ufos, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds by Jacques Vallee. We had never been to the UFO Mecca and our journey to Roswell would make that a reality. It’s not a short trip, 192 miles from city center to city center and it would take a good four hours as we would learn after leaving Santa Fe heading south on US-285, a long two-lane black top that sporadically widened into four lanes or into a passing lane for one side or the other along its length. Four hours later, we arrived in Roswell, a sleepy farming and ranching community that time seems to have left behind in the 1950s.

We find the International Museum and Research Center at 104 N Main Street—Main Street is US-285 through Roswell. It’s an interesting place filled with nearly every conceivable piece of UFO memorabilia, as well as displays and information about the Roswell Incident. The story is that a rancher named W.W. "Mack" Brazel found metal debris that appeared to be the wreckage of an UFO. The U.S. Air Force was called in and shortly after arriving the local Air Force Information Officer issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a crashed disc had been recovered. The release was almost immediately retracted but the damage had been done. The world had been told that a UFO had crashed in Roswell, something the local believed occurred. However, most of the witnesses who saw the debris and the bodies of aliens reported to be recovered at the crash site are no longer around to testify as to what they really saw.

The visit was anticlimactic, as it neither made us more convinced one way of the other regarding the validity of the incident. But like sites of religious revelations, Roswell has become the place all true believers come to. No longer true believers we had come. We left after a lunch of burgers and fries and spent another four hours getting back to Santa Fe, where Southwestern art and cuisine replaces myths as a draw. After resting for an hour or two after our return journey, we partook of the cuisine and called it a day.

March 24, 2005 – A Few of My Favorite Things

March 24, 2005 – A Few of My Favorite Things

I spoke with my Dad this week and found that his last duty to his lifelong friend who had passed away over a year had finally been completed. My Dad’s friend Charles Upton was an unrestrained collector, never throwing anything away. When Mr. Upton died, my Father could not bring himself to discard the belongings the old man had collected. His remedy was to construct a large metal storage building on a piece of property Mr. Upton sold my dad many years earlier. He would store all those belongings in that building, where they would remain as long as my dad was alive. “After I’m gone, you guys can do whatever you want with it all,” my father says, the words of a man aware that his wishes only remain in force as long as he is alive.

The move had gone off with only one major hitch. Among the stuff Charles Upton collected was garbage that he had neglected to discard and had been piled in among the collection: stacks of odd shaped pieces of wood—the discards of a carpentry project, stacks of paper bags from many now forgotten El Paso stores—Furrs Grocery, Franklin 5 and 10, among the countless numbers of brown paper bags, torn clothes obviously stored as rags, bits and pieces of metal—extra pieces of a toilet repair kit or discarded door locks replaced but not discarded. These my brother D piled into a truck and haul off to a recycling center only to find the center closed when he turned up with his load. The truck sits in D’s parking lot—he owns a fleet of short haul trucks—waiting for an opportunity to unload. When I call next time, I’m expecting to hear the truck had been emptied.

My father's collection bears much in common with that of Mr. Upton’s. His is stored in a basement constructed between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. It was to serve many purposes, one of which was to survive the blast of an atomic bomb. They created and tested the first such weapon not far from El Paso. The basement was the most difficult of the larger construction projects my dad had commissioned which was to ring a small one-room adobe house and create a larger home comprising three bedrooms, two baths, and a living room. The original adobe became the kitchen. Looking at the house from the front, the basement was underneath the right third of the house, running from the front of the building all the way to be the back. Being in that basement, we would survive atomic blast, a tornado, a hurricane, nearly anything nature or man could throw at us. It was also remarkably cool in summer, when outside temperatures soared into the high 90s and warm in winter when the temperature could dip into the teens.

The second purpose of that basement was to store all our possessions collected over the years of our lives. There is an Emerson black and white television set down there. All my schoolwork and that of my three sisters along with every school yearbook can be found down there. It also holds bits and pieces of cars my dad has rebuilt—starter motors, generators, odd pieces of tailpipe, and jars and jars of odd size nuts, screws and bolts. My dad nailed the lids of old mayonnaise jars to the ceiling and screwed the jars to the lids. They appear to be hanging by their own accord defying gravity. There is a complete collection black-bound books comprising a complete course in electronics by Lee DeForrest. Oddly enough the collection was there all the time I was growing up yet I learned everything I know about electronics from a 48 week course taught at the U.S. Naval Electronics School on Treasure Island—in San Francisco Bay halfway to Oakland. And there are tools, every conceivable tool a handy man or mechanic would need to fix just about anything can be found in that basement.

That basement is a journal recorded in things of our lives. If you compared it to a work of art, it would be a mixed media collage within a box. Each piece of the artwork has a significance of its own placed in that part of the basement by each of us collectively creating the work. But, it was my dad who would rearrange the order to suit his sense of esthetics. Every time I go home to visit my folks, I always go down into the basement looking for lost pieces of my past, trying to find that younger person hiding behind a stack of books, stuck away in a box. One time, as I was looking about the basement, I came upon a box that contained all my navy uniforms, my dress blue wool jumper, and thirteen-button, bell-bottom pants. I also found a couple of sets of dress white uniforms, a white jumper with white bell-bottom pants—these had button fly front. I took them with me when I left and they are still in one of my dresser drawers. I look at them occasionally and longingly wish I could fit into them again, but my 31-in waist would damage the 29-in waist of all the pants and I would be hard pressed to get into that very young man’s jumper. Still I keep them in my dresser, my younger self kept close by to help me grow old gracefully.

The more I contemplate my dad’s and Mr. Upton’s fascination with their material possessions, the more I learn about myself.

March 23, 2005 – My Annual IRS Check-up

March 23, 2005 – My Annual IRS Check-up

I spent Friday and all of last weekend preparing for my meeting this week with my tax accounting KS. He has been my counsel on all matters IRS a score of years or more. He knows more about my financial wellbeing than I do. He sees the world in figures, whereas I’ve always pictured it with words. He’s teaching me the tax benefits of real estate investment—something I ventured into after the stock market lost its luster. My father stored his wealth in real estate, rental properties in El Paso and land in Mississippi that had been in the family since the Emancipation Proclamation. He sold it recently to his cousin so it’s still in the family.

Owning real estate is a legal term that grew up around civilization. As soon as you die, the property is dispersed either at your discretion through a will or by edict of the court. Regardless, you no longer possess the piece of earth, the physical structure built on the land, nor the artifacts contained therein. Everything you built can be torn down and rebuilt by the new owner. All the belongings you collected over the years dispersed into collections of others—their collections will suffer a similar fate: order giving way to disorder only to find a new order.

California is a place where the precariousness of real estate ownership really becomes apparent. Those poor souls living beneath the hillside of mud that buried their homes, suddenly confronted by how ineffectual the law was in conferring possession to them. Those poor souls living along the earthquake faults seeing their earthly possessions moving, suffer a similar realization that nature has little respect for manmade laws. The legal system provides a clear meaning of who has the right to occupy a piece of earth some length and width in size and how that right can be conveyed from one owner to another time after time.

When you purchase real estate, there are volumes of forms that must be signed, notarized, and recorded in government offices. The volumes confer legal force to your claim of ownership, but only the most informed expert in real estate law can fathom the exact legal meaning of these documents. There are environmental rules that must be observed, truth in lending disclosures that must be adhered to, and in some cases homeowner associations to contend with. As land speculators, what my wife “I” and I have been for the past couple of years, we have special tax forms that must be completed and filed with the IRS. That’s where KS comes in.

I learned about depreciation the great godsend of land speculators: determining how much of your property’s value has been eroded by time and wear and tear. I learned that claiming depreciation is like ordering Fugu fish (blow fish) at a Japanese restaurant. You can have the chef give you a piece that contains none of the poisons that can kill the unsuspecting diner. You can ask for the chef to provide just enough to give you a sense of numbness, or you can ask for a cut that can give you a euphoric high while administering slight paralysis in the process. The amount of depreciation you declare on your tax return kind of fits these same levels: conservative—well within the IRS guidelines, a more profitable amount that could raise the eyebrows at the IRS but not warrant an audit, or the maximum amount that will have the IRS considering hauling you in for an audit. Each represents successfully higher amounts of income to the taxpayer’s pocket at an increasing risk of being audited by the IRS. I tell KS to slice me a piece with none of the poisons. I’ll sleep easier at night.

March 17, 2005 – Chang Kai Shek Airport Wednesday Night

March 17, 2005 – Chang Kai Shek Airport Wednesday Night

EVA flight BR-0027 brought me from San Francisco to Taipei to produce a daylong conference that came off on Tuesday, largely without a hitch and to the satisfaction of everyone who participated. The difficulty for me is comprehending what happened from the short compressed period of anxious anticipation on Sunday, last minute details on Monday the day before the event, the largely sleepless Monday night, then the great activity on Tuesday, followed by a denoucement that left me drained and somehow feeling abandoned. That’s how I was feeling on Wednesday evening walking about Chang Kai Shek airport two hours before EVA flight BR-0018 was scheduled to return me to California.

CKS International Airport is located in Dayuan County approximately 40 kilometers, or about 50 minutes by car or bus from Hsin Chu, where my event was held. I was in Terminal 2, home to Evergreen (EVA) Airlines as well as several others including Singapore, Air Canada, KLM, and United. The terminal sits in the cross member of an H-shaped building with the legs of the H containing the gates for all the airlines. I walked the length of both legs for an hour and a half before my flight took off thinking about the details of the past several days, trying to hold onto them, as they faded away into the past. Like an airplane taking off and the ground receding into the distance as the plane gains altitude, the memories of the Sunday through Tuesday were quickly becoming part of the past.

We go through our lives living from one memorable moment to the next. Some moments, a birthday, an anniversary, etc. are over in an evening when everyone comes together to celebrate. Others moments consume more time, the birth of a child, a wedding, the completion of college, your first million-dollar sale, the initial public offering of a start-up, the gold medal at the Olympics. All of these are the culmination of compounded labor invested over time, the preparation fundamental to the success of the final moment. When each of these moments occur, the many efforts that led up to them are finally released, a collective sigh—the breath expelled after being held in anticipation of something.

The emptiness I feel is the result of energy once expended in preparation and execution suddenly having nothing to spend itself upon. That is why I’m trudging restlessly along the long lengths of corridors inside Terminal 2 of Chang Kai Shek airport, walking off energy wanting some form of release. As I walk I’m reminded that almost a year ago, I was taking these same steps in the aftermath of our first event in Taiwan. The earlier differed from the present by being the first, but the feelings were the same. Looking back at both, the first has lost its distinction and clarity, compared to the second. It’s similar to being in a room with opposing mirrors and seeing the endless reflected image of yourself receding into each mirror. The closest one has the most distinction and clarity. That is the nature of time, a long sequence of repeated events, receding into, an increasingly indistinct past.

Trying to hold that moment of satisfaction, experienced when the last minute of the daylong event ends is futile I know; no different than standing in a stream and trying to restrain the flow. Just like the stream, time continues on leaving your moment behind. I’m left with beginning work, on the next moment that will just as swiftly come and go. The Myth of Sisyphus so succinctly encapsulates the nature of life.

March 13, 2005 – San Francisco to Taipei

March 13, 2005 – San Francisco to Taipei

Friday afternoon, 3:00 PM, BR0027 Evergreen Airlines (EVA) sits at Gate G98, a leviathan Boeing 747 with its distinctive green exterior being groomed by ant-like humans scurrying about beneath its enormous fuselage. At the rear of the aircraft, huge cargo handlers lift pallets stacked almost as tall as the aircraft’s body with shrink-wrapped boxes bound for Taiwan. The pallets are lifted to the cargo hatch, a huge mouth of a door that swallows the pallets as if they were morsels to be devoured in one bite. Passengers on this plane are clearly filling space that would otherwise be hauling goods. At 3:40 PM, the loudspeaker blares its message that BR0027 would be delayed in its departure. The official reason is that the cabin is still being prepared. Indeed, the beast’s belly has not been fully loaded with the commodities that will make this flight profitable for EVA. Most commercial passenger carrying jets haul cargo in the space beneath the passenger cabins. But this plane had half the passenger seats in the aft of the plane removed and it was greedily devouring payload.

An hour and a half later with the monster’s appetite finally sated, the gate agents announce that BR0027 would be boarding first class and business class passengers only. Families with children or other persons requiring extra time in the boarding process are also invited to board. I’m in neither category so I wait my turn. Minutes later I accept the gate agent’s invitation for Evergreen Deluxe Class to board. You pay a few hundred dollars over coach but you get a seat that provides legroom and a footrest. On the over 14-hour outbound flight, these luxuries would come to be appreciated. As it turns out, my seat is the second from the front of the aircraft starboard side (right) of the Boeing 747’s lower level. I used to climb the stairs to the luxury deck when I traveled to Asia in more affluent times, but that was then, this is now. I sit in my aisle seat and wait for the passenger seated in the window seat to arrive before I buckle up. In this location on the aircraft, there are two seats on port and starboard side of for several rows so the aisle is wider than anywhere else in coach. The space gives the allusion of comfort, as you don’t feel hemmed in.

The flight attendant’s voice comes over the intercom first in Chinese then in English to secure the doors and crosscheck—I’ll have to ask someone what crosscheck means. I’m pleasantly surprised that I’ll have no traveling companion for the journey and I look back to see a few other empty seats in the rows behind me. I thank St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers and spread out dumping the book I purchased at Pacific Gateway News Store at SFO—The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. “One gorgeous read” raves Stephen King underneath the notice at the top saying “The New York Times Bestseller” and my Bose noise canceling earphones (they really do reduce the sound of jet engines to white noise) into the window seat next to me.

I stupidly left my sweatshirt in my suitcase, which I checked at the ticket counter—I usually carry it on board to avoid having to use the airline supplied blankets. Sans sweatshirt I wrap myself in the green EVA blanket. As the well-fed beast lumbers to the end of the runway and turns, it revs its engines and rolls gaining speed as it moves. There is a tension about takeoffs that after countless times doing it, never seems to ease. It’s a sense of foreboding that doesn’t stop until the giant has finally broken free of earth and soars skyward leaving the runway and airport behind. The tension drains and the motion of the plane shuddering as landing gear retracts and ailerons change to bank the plane to starboard or port following the control towers instructions, into its planned flight path, lull me to sleep. It seems I’ve been asleep for quite some time but when I wake, I can still see the coastline as the plane begins to pass over a fog bank extending far out into the Pacific. I move into the window seat to gaze back at the receding shore being obscured by the white ruffled layer of fog. In the distance the sun is beginning its descent into the horizon. The plane resembles an errant commuter rushing to catch a departing train in that we are literally chasing the sun to Asia. It’s a race we will lose but the 747 is making a go of it.

Traveling west with the sun the jumbo jet has an inherent disadvantage. At its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, it’s battling a terrific headwind. Ground speed in this direction barely exceeds 600 miles per hour. By contrast, on the return flight, with these same winds at its back a 747 can come close to 800 miles and hour, shaving a good two hours or more off the flight time.

Anyone who travels a great deal by plane tends to become insular probably because you are so crammed in tight with others—even on the luxury deck—that you want to turn inward to find the space deprived of by your surrounding. The myriad of video and audio programming from the aircraft entertainment system is one form of diversion, but for many travelers, it’s that booked they picked up at the airport before they took off. I start The Shadow of the Wind. I bought the book because it brought to mind Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, which I had read—it was made into the movie The Ninth Gate. Both books involve stories involving characters tied up in the antiquarian book business. If I were any good at business or a thief that needed a place to launder his ill-gotten gains, I would open a second hand bookstore.

The main character in this new novel is Daniel Sempere who at the start of the book is 11 years old. His father owns a second hand bookstore and his mother has passed away. As the story begins the boy’s father is taking him to a place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a place that conjures images of Antonio Gaudi’s Casa Batllo. His father introduces him to Isaac who rules this place and he is invited to pick one book that he must keep secret to himself. Daniel buys the book, The Shadow of the Wind by Julien Carax, a Spanish author who published in Paris. Daniel reads the book, become smitten with it and seeks to find other work by the author. The antiquarian booksellers have no copies but one, the wealthy Gustavo Barcelo himself an avid collector, wants to buy the book from Daniel. The story becomes Daniel’s quest to learn of the author and locate his other works, but his quest is being dogged by another sinister character intent of burning every copy of any of Carax’s work.

I don’t finish the book during the flight. In fact, I’m distracted by want of sleep. After our meal, I try to let the two small glasses of red wine ease me into la la land, but I end up channel switching. It takes a few hours alternating between the video programming, the book, and the USA Today I got from the airline before I finally doze off. We were a little over a thousand miles into a 6522-mile journey. When I wake up the numbers are reversed, a little over two thousand miles to go with forty five hundred miles behind us. The sun, which was barely visible on the horizon had left us behind and was already carrying Saturday toward Western Europe.

Eventually, the mileage counter begins to decrement toward zero. We’re 31 miles from Taipei. Outside the aircraft it’s raining cats and dogs. We are streaking through storm clouds being buffeted in our progress. The temperature outside is 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 10:58 PM. Our bags will be coming out of carousel number 4. The trek through immigration is short; only one other flight lands with us and the lines are no more than eight deep. I make it through immigration with my passport stamped by the agent—I miss having the stamps from other places like the U.S. upon return and many places in Europe all of which record everything electronically now. I collect my bag, find my ride to the Ambassador Hotel in Hsin Chu, where I’m staying and settle in for the long ride. I eventually get checked in and into my room just after 1:00PM. I call home to announce my arrival then settle in for a good nights sleep.

March 11, 2005 – Making our way to Santa Fe

March 11, 2005 – Making our way to Santa Fe

Needles, California reminded me of El Paso when we drove into the parking lot of the Best Western Colorado River Inn, at about 5:00 in the afternoon on Friday July 23rd 1999. El Paso crushes up against its own river, the Rio Grande, just like needles presses close to the more impressive Colorado. It’s about 2 blocks east off the West Broadway exit from Interstate 40 on the west end of town. The Colorado’s cool dark water was clearly visible off the driver’s side as we approached the West Broadway exit. The motel, for that's what it was, ran the length of a broad blacktop parking lot with head-in parking facing the second floor rooms of the motel and parking space across the driveway from the motel for the overflow.

It was over a 100 degrees when we unfolded from the air conditioned comfort of my wife “I”’s late model Jaguar XJ6, her pride and joy—the dream come true for a kid growing up in the suburbs of Glasgow watching elegant Jags pass her by on the London Road as she walked to school. There was no shade in that parking lot only a blazing hot sun beating down on baking macadam. We left our bags in the car, walked to the motel office, a high-ceilinged room sitting behind a Porte Cochere big enough for the cab of an 18-wheeler to drive through—at least it seemed that way. We got checked in and returned to the car, grabbed our bags from the now warming car interior mounted the stairs to the motel’s second floor and found our way to a room halfway between the office and the end of the long cinder block structure. The room was stuffy and we put the room air conditioner on full blast realizing that the noise would keep us off our sleep that night.

We dozed for an hour until the sun began to sink. At about 7:00 that evening we decided to venture out for dinner. Right next door to the Best Western is the Hungry Bear Restaurant and it was near enough that we decided to brave the elements and walk. This was the restaurant I remembered from my childhood before chains such as the now forgotten Sambo’s and today’s omnipresent Denny’s ran them all out of business; that is except for places like Needles, Blythe—on Interstate 10, and other small communities living off the Interstate and the surrounding farming community. Here they thrive because the locals come to socialize and the owners are reason enough to come. We had fast food cooked slow—hamburgers and fries and lots of cold water. As is my practice, I had a glass of the red wine that had no pretension of a name, but with the stick-to-your-ribs burger and decent fries, it was the perfect complement to the meal.

After a night’s sleep interrupted by noises in the night—the air conditioner turning on and off was maliciously trying to keep us off our rest—we woke refreshed and ready for the second leg of our journey: Needles across Arizona to Santa Fe. We check out of the motel, gas up at the Desert View Mobil Station next door and then merge onto Interstate 40 and head east, passing historic Route 66 which slices through the middle of downtown Needles. Stretches of the road made famous in the still popular song still run through the towns mentioned in the lyrics: “Flagstaff, Arizona don’t forget Winona, Kingman…” and then there’s “Gallup, New Mexico”. Each has signs along parts of their main street where the old highway still runs through. In Kingman, the once grand roadway has suffered the neglect of most all thoroughfares in small and medium size towns. They resembled old black men with pitted skin and liver spots where new macadam covers a pothole too big to ignore. We stopped in Kingman for breakfast—yes it was a Denny’s off the Interstate, though we did take an earlier exit in search of another greasy spoon like the Hungry Bear, but to no avail. I stocked up on cash at a Norwest Bank ATM—Norwest had just been bought by Wells Fargo, our bank in San Jose so there was no transaction fee.

Outside of Kingman, Interstate 40 begins a slow gradual climb toward Flagstaff and a land of green that makes you wonder how the same state can contain two such diverse ecosystems. The parched deserts of Phoenix and Tucson and the lands east and west of both cities and the lush green timber-populated land clustered around Flagstaff that experiences a proper winter, not the shirtsleeve substitute of the desert. Flagstaff has always meant the Grand Canyon to me. It’s where we’ve always stopped for the night—the Pony Soldier Motel at 3030 East Route 66—before our visit to Ferde Grofe's muse. We didn’t stop this time, we kept on moving. After another 36 miles east, we pass Meteor Crater off Interstate 40 at exit 233.

A few more hours of hard fast driving, the red rock panorama on either side of the road for miles, we reach Gallup a couple of hours after noon. Gallup is surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural land formations, as you’ll ever see—the Monument Valley with its natural red rock formations where filmmakers like John Ford of old, came to capture stunning scenery only a big screen can attempt to reproduce. It is also the largest American Indian center in the Southwest, surrounded by Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Navajo and Hopi pueblos. The first time “I” and I drove through Gallup together, we had her brother and sister in law in the back seat. It was close to eight and we hadn’t made hotel reservations and stopped at the first motel that looked vacant. It was the El Capitan Motel. When we went in to register I knew it was a winner for our guests. The place was a museum of old movie memorabilia. Hollywood used the motel when shooting those westerns in the surrounding desert and the walls had pictures of every major star of the 1940s and 1950s. And the rooms were named after different stars, presumably because they stayed in them at one time. The interior of the place looked like the set of the Ponderosa from the TV series Bonanza. I’ll revisit Gallup another time, as it is a small town with a story.

More driving through a slightly greener less colorful landscape accompany the drive into Albuquerque. Once there, it’s another big southwestern city not much different in appearance from Tucson, Phoenix, or El Paso. As I 40 intersects Interstate 25 we exit northbound and point the car toward the high desert and Santa Fe. At about five in the evening, we finally reach Santa Fe and find our way to the Ft Marcy Inn, named for an 1846 Santa Fe US Military outpost that was located close by. It’s located at 320 Artist Road, near the Paseo de Peralta, a circular road ringing the capital and city center on the northeast side of Santa Fe, very close too to Canyon Road, a southwester art lover’s paradise of galleries and art boutiques. Ft Marcy would be our base for a week in the upscale southwest.

March 9, 2005 – Touring California en Route to Santa Fe

March 9, 2005 – Touring California en Route to Santa Fe

In 1999, my wife “I” and I made a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico driving her car, which had very low mileage—as all her cars do since she doesn’t commute and her daily trips are all within a 10 mile radius of our house. Well we were going to put some miles on her car and the trip began on Friday July 23rd. From San Jose we drove south on 101 and cut across to Interstate 5 by way of Highway 152 just south of Gilroy. Interstate 5 in the middle of July runs through some of the hottest parts of California with the temperature near or exceeding the 100 degree mark at different points along its length.

We left the Interstate at Buttonwillow getting onto Highway 58—the Rosedale Highway—through the California described in John Steinbeck novels, farmland as far as the eye can see with thousands of acres under cultivation. Sixteen miles from the Interstate we pass through the town of Greenacres, of significance to anyone into old 1960s sitcoms—though the TV series was two words, whereas this town ran the two words together. Another 16 miles and we’re in Bakersfield and on our way to Tehachapi. I pass a kid in a 60s Chevy doing close to 80 get back into the right lane a quarter mile ahead of him and keep moving driving the speedometer up close to 90. My wife’s car has some heart—I gave it that.

As you leave Bakerfield, Highway 58 starts to climb into the Tehachapi range, a short transverse range running southwest to northeast that connect the Coast Ranges on the west with the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountains on the east. As we begin our steady climb over into the mountains, the kid in the Chevy get tired of being left in the dust by a old guy in a new foreign car so he pushes the petal on his Chevy and passes me with authority doing over 90 while I idled along at 75 as the mountain had slowed my progress and I hadn’t emptied my gas tank at a faster pace to compensate. From Caliente, which is 20 miles or so west of Bakersfield, to the city of Tehachapi—at the summit of the range—the rise is 2,735 feet, reaching 4000 feet above sea level. About fifteen minutes after the kid in the Chevy passed us, we saw him stopped by a CHP cruiser getting a ticket. I felt bad that I kind of provoked his plight, but if I had not done it, someone else would have. It was his fate to get a ticket that day.

In this desolate part of California—with its wide open spaces it’s hard to picture it being part of a state known for its sprawling gridlocked freeways in northern and southern metropolises. It’s high desert and the one man made marvel that can be found here is the railroad that runs for miles along stretches of Highway 58. And the trains being pulled are of incredible lengths, boxcar after boxcar, tanker after tanker, container carrier after container carrier. I cringe thinking of being stopped at a railroad crossing waiting for one of them to cross. To get these behemoths up the incredibly steep grade, Southern Pacific—then Central Pacific—Railroad engineer William Hood designed the Tehachapi loop. The track literally winds one complete turn around the summit of the range at Tehachapi pass. The loop is 3,799 feet long, with a typical diameter of about 1210 feet. Chinese workers from Guongjhou, which used to be Canton, built the railroad using dynamite, picks and shovels. They called the loop Walong—it is an incredible piece of construction.

Once over the pass, we descended into the great Mohave Desert, passing over the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the other manmade marvel, which was the McGuffin in the movie Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Fay Dunaway. Once beyond the town of Mohave, we pass the edge of Edwards Air Force Base, then Boron—I visualize Ronald Reagan in black and white introducing the TV show Death Valley Days sponsored by 20-Mule Team Borax. The 20-mule teams ran from Death Valley to the town of Mojave during the late 1800's, a 20-day journey that averaged 15 to 18 miles a day—and I complain about my daily 40-mile, hour-and-a-half-round-trip commute. Beyond Boron we make good time passing through Barstow—a major railroad-switching town. My uncle Robert worked for the railroad out of Barstow from the time my grandmother died until he passed away on Valentine’s Day in 1968, the day our oldest daughter “M” was born.

The rest of the drive is uneventful and the scenery out the window of our air-conditioned sedan is Mojave Desert to the horizon in every direction you look. I push the speedometer needle close to 90 and make for Needles on the California-Arizona border where we have reservations at the Best Western Motel. There we see the cool fast flowing waters of the Colorado River rushing to escape the sucking force of California and Arizona Aqueduct siphoning its life giving essence to feed parched fertile farmlands on either side of the border-line, between the two states. A trickle of the once mighty flow will escape to Mexico, but not before being stopped at the Imperial Dam and the Laguna Dam, a few miles from the Mexican border. Tomorrow, the journey along historic Route 66.

March 5, 2005 – Late 1970s Silicon Valley Gold Miners

March 5, 2005 – Late 1970s Silicon Valley Gold Miners

In 1978, public relations in Silicon Valley was relatively new. It was a service provided largely by advertising agencies, whose revenue came from producing print ad and placing them in publications for clients, a very lucrative business back then. I got into PR after being an editor for a now-defunct technical magazine produced by a small mom and pop publishing company based in Littleton, Massachusetts. Less than nine months after joining the magazine, I had come to the attention of Palo Alto-based Regis Mckenna advertising and Public Relations then handling Intel as their flagship account as well as several other high-tech companies. With my background in computers and experience as an editor, I was hired at what I considered back then an exorbitant salary. Upon arrival I was made account executive for Intel. When Apple Computer got its first round of financing and came to the agency’s door demanding advertising and PR, I was also assigned PR AE for them as well.

Apple was by far the more exciting client to have at the time. The PC was then called the home computer to distinguish it from “real” computers that did real work computing the trajectory of rockets launched from Camp Kennedy, computing the payroll for the U.S. Military, and ensuring that passengers got sold a seat on commercial airlines. The PC caused a great deal of consternation among the high priests of computing back then, IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. There is a word-of-mouth story about Ken Olson, the founder of Digital, seriously asking what the average citizen needed with a computer. The truth is back then the average citizens needed a computer to mine gold in what was looming as the next great gold rush to emerge from California. It was clearly evident in the first West Coast Computer Faire held in San Francisco’s Brooks Hall.

Jim Warren, the man responsible for the faire knew there were a lot of start-up companies that had hardware and software to sell and they needed a market to reach potential buyers. When the show opened people were lined up for blocks waiting to get in and it wasn’t free, you had to pay. When you entered the place it was capitalism in the raw: rows and rows of tables with circuit boards, computer terminals, and rack mount boxes all drawing lots of power and generating lots of heat. Behind these tables were nerds with white shirts, ties, and pocket protectors, wearing polyester pants with geometric weaves—the business dress of the day. Among the buyers were similarly clad customers, but there were a lot of the last wave flower children mingling with the nerds. Unfulfilled after a decade of free love and homegrown pharmaceuticals, these born again entrepreneurs wandered the halls with dollar signs dancing in the heads. Out of this human wave of innovation sprang up companies with names life Morrow Design, Ohio Scientific, Altair, Vector Graphics, and thousands more, most going broke with a handful moving from bankruptcy, right into a new venture with a new name and fresh credit.

When Apple got started, there was already a very successful PC company called Commodore Computers and its product was the PET. Apple II came along and the two competed to be joined by a third, Radio Shack, with its TRS80 or as it was affectionately called the Trash 80. The Apple II and the PET were powered by the 6502 processor, the Trash 80 by the Intel 8080. A CPU designer named “Chuck” Peddle was the father of the 6502 and it was the alternative to the 8080, which was the engine in most of the other no-name machines—I say no-name because most lacked any brand marketing to build one. The other distinction was that the no-name machines made by Altair and the others were going into small business who wanted to replace expensive computers from the well-known computer giants with systems that cost 100 times less in some cases.

The PET, Apple II, and the TRS80 were finding their way into homes and into small software shops developing software to run on these machines. Game guys were the first to make a killing off these platforms but that didn’t happen until the advent of the floppy disk drive. Up until then, programs and data for these three systems were loaded onto and off these machines with a cassette tape recorder and it was a painful process that only the truly committed would endure. The story of the floppy disk began at IBM, who developed an 8-in. diameter disk to go onto computer equipment to run diagnostic programs. Ex-IBMers saw a gold mine selling these disk drives to emerging no-name computer companies and left Big Blue to start floppy disk drive companies like now-defunct Shugart Associates.

Shugart had been selling 8-in. floppy drives to one of the major customer in the late 1970s and early 80s, Wang Labs, who back then made dedicated word processors. Dr. An Wang, who in 1983 funded the restoration of Boston’s Wang Center, came to Shugart and asked for a floppy disk drive that was smaller than the 8-in. unit. The folklore goes—and I’ve heard slightly different versions from different Shugart sales guys—that a Shugart salesman asked if what Dr. Wang was looking for was about the size of a cocktail napkin. It was and the 5 ¼-in floppy drive came into being. The second part of the folklore, details a meeting between Shugart's then CEO, Don Massaro and Apple founder Steve Jobs. Upon learning about the smaller drive, he approached Massaro and demanded to have Shugart’s entire production of the smaller storage units. Massaro explained nicely he would get a much smaller allotment, but the result was the second major product, I did the PR release for, the Apple Disk II. It was a hit from the very beginning. Suddenly these small home computers were real machines.

My time at the Regis McKenna agency was a whirlwind of activity, with strategy meetings between Apple and the agency trying to fathom what people were actually doing with these computers. There were games being developed for the machine as well as checkbook and recipe programs. We had photo shoots where we put the computer into interesting settings in the home. I helped a French television crew film the PC in a house in the Oakland Hills. Another photographer from a European magazine wanted shots of a family using the computer. My two daughters were photographed playing games, the agency’s office manager Rhoda was photographed in the kitchen looking up recipes. The whole strategy was to portray the computer as the machine for the “every person”—pretty prophetic though the applications have certainly changed.

That change began in May 1979, when a software program called VisiCalc came out for the Apple II and everyone suddenly realized that the PC was really a personal productivity tool. VisiCalc, created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, two college students in Boston, was the first spreadsheet program. Bricklin used the program to analyze a business case at Harvard Business School: the “Pepsi Challenge” ad campaign. The program became an instant hit and drove sales of Apple II machines with Disk II drives. The success of VisiCalc sent more gold miners back to their keyboards looking for their VisiCalc. A handful found it; the rest came up empty.

March 4, 2005 – Epitaph for a Magazine

March 4, 2005 – Epitaph for a Magazine

Opened Hotmail early this week from my computer at work—love Hotmail you can access you mail from any computer anywhere. Once I entered my password and logged on, I find the one or two pieces of junk mail—stock tips from CBS Marketwatch, Bambi Francisco is on about some dotcom thing, I’ve just qualified for a once in a lifetime low 30 year mortgage rate, and so on. I trash everything and then I click “pop” and magically, Hotmail accesses two other e-mails I have and one of the two—the one for this website literatureview.com has a message.

It’s from a chemical trade organization. They are doing a special symposium commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Gordon Moore’s pronouncement of “Moore’s Law”. It’s kind of a slippery law that gets interpreted differently as time passes. I won’t go into the technical mumbo jumbo regarding the law. Suffice it to say that it has made the computer you are using to view this blog so inexpensive that nearly every place in the world has a good percentage of their inhabitance able to afford them.

Moore published this law in Electronics magazine in 1965, published at that time, by McGraw-Hill, the 6th Avenue publishing house that still publishes Business Week. In case you’re wondering, the magazine coined the term “electronics” when it debuted in April 1930 under the editorship of O.H. Caldwell. In his editorial charter, he said, “For this vital, pulsing electronic art (I loved the fact that he called it an art), a clearinghouse is needed—an engineering journal that will gather together these widespread activities, chronicle scientific and industrial advances abroad and here, and provide practical usable information which can be put to work.” Gordon Moore’s article in the 1965 issue of the magazine certainly fit the criteria for publication in the magazine.

In the e-mail query I received, the writer wanted to find a copy of the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics to have the article on hand at the event—an artifact that made the law tangible so to speak. When he went looking for the magazine it was nowhere to be found. He first went to McGraw Hill, but the company unloaded the property in 1988. And no, they did not have a library that had back issues of the publication. He then went looking for the magazine on the web in hopes of finding someone who could help him in his quest. Guess what, my name popped up as the last person associated with the title. In his e-mail he asked if he could give me a call. I said sure and gave him my cell phone number to call the following morning as I commuted to work. He was on Eastern Standard Time.

He called at 7:30 my time and wanted to know about the magazine, what had become of it, who owned it now, where he could go to get back issues, etc. It was similar to someone asking the whereabouts of a deceased person. You have to inform the person making the inquiry that the person is deceased. And the natural response to the news is further questions: how could that happen to such a magazine that published “Moore’s Law.” I knew the story of Electronics starting in the late 1970s when I worked in public relations, where I pitched clients—Intel and Apple—to the publication. A year and a half later I moved into technical journalism and worked for five years on a publication that competed with the Electronics. In 1986, I moved to Electronics and remained there until the end.

I was charged with the task of putting this once great publication to rest. It was not an undertaking I relished. My tenure as editor of the magazine began in 1990 and ended five years later. By the time I arrived, the great journal had been damaged so badly that it was in a horrible state. In 1988, McGraw-Hill sold the magazine to a Dutch publishing company. A few years earlier, the Dutch had acquired the New Jersey company, which I had worked for and directly competed with Electronics. the Dutch purchased Electronics to eliminate a major competitor and also to create a business publication that would complement their technical magazine.

The logic wasn’t flawed as Electronics had always covered the business as well as the technology of the industry. At one time it had bureaus in London, Paris, Munich, and Tokyo and these were staffed mostly by journalists. The 6th Avenue editorial headquarters were where the engineers, turned journalist, resided. They would convert arcane technical prose into understandable English. The staff could easily convert over to covering business exclusively. Most of the field editors and those in the home office had executive contacts in all the major electronics companies in the industry.

Thus the reasoning behind the sale was sound, however, the execution of the strategy went horribly wrong. First, Electronics was published every other week, the same frequency as the Dutch technical journal. The first change the Dutch made was to reduce the frequency to once a month—effectively cutting the revenues of the publication by over fifty percent. Electronics’ large staff was likewise cut in half, with many abandoning the publication before it moved from Manhattan to New Jersey. McGraw-Hill had also made a similar misstep with the magazine’s frequency earlier in the decade resulting in the same financial disaster. To recover after a revolt from the advertisers, McGraw-Hill began publishing the magazine weekly and then returning to its every other week schedule a year later. The Dutch obviously had forgotten history and moved forward.

However, The next misstep was far more disastrous. From its inception in 1930, Electronics was largely sold to subscribers. The Dutch and the New Jersey publisher it acquired were both companies that produced controlled circulation journals. Subscribers got the magazine delivered free but had to provide demographic information about their job functions, purchasing influence, etc. This audience demographic was sold to advertisers wanting to reach this profile. The trouble with 60 percent of the Electronics paid subscriber base was there was no such data that could be sold to advertisers. The Dutch determined that there was no way to get this information. The obvious solution was to eliminate the paid subscription base and grow the 40 percent of the circulation with demographic data the magazine’s sales force could sell to advertisers.

I don’t recall the circulation of Electronics back then (I should but I’ve forgotten), but let’s say it was 70,000. The decision was made to send 42,000 paid subscribers a form letter saying Electronics will no longer be accepting paid subscriptions and the remainder of your current subscription will be reimbursed with Discovery magazine. The letter was sent under the name of Electronics’ publisher back then. Not surprisingly there was such a great backlash from the subscriber base that the Dutch retracted the letter. Among the outraged phone calls and letters the publisher received was one from the Wall Street Journal that asked “what kind of idiot would do such a thing…” or words that effect. Though the Dutch recanted, the damage had been done and the subscription base began its slow decline. Many of my contacts that were subscribers told me that was the last straw; they were giving up on the magazine. It was one of my saddest days at the magazine.

The story doesn’t end there. About the time all this was happening, the Dutch in Haarlem were growing weary of its underperforming operation in New Jersey and decided to sell off the operation. The U.S. subsidiary was put on the blocks and a Cleveland-based publisher came forward to buy the property. It had wanted only one of the publications—the technical publication, but decided to purchase two others in the stable, one of which was Electronics. It seems the chairman of the Cleveland company—a 70-year old ex-editor—had a soft spot for the magazine, having known it from its earlier glory. By the time Cleveland took possession, most of the editorial staff had left except for me, the copy desk, the Munich bureau editor—a great guy and a wonderful writer, and a handful of technical editors in the New Jersey office. I was made editor because the publisher—the guy who received the scathing letter from the WSJ—lived in California and wanted an editor he could interact with daily.

We made a valiant effort to breath new life into the ailing journal, but the publisher got frustrated trying to get Cleveland to invest in the circulation and he left to join a start-up in Mountain View. Near the end of 1993, the writing was on the wall. Advertisers could not be convinced that Cleveland would invest enough in the publication to make it worth their while to support. Cleveland management made the decision to convert the monthly publication into a every-other-week 16-page newsletter sent to the paid subscriber base. The subscription revenue was sufficient to cover a reduced editorial staff of largely freelance writers based in Europe and Asia, a small copy desk in Cleveland and me. This strategy failed because the normal attrition of paid subscribers had to be replenished and Cleveland had no experience acquiring paid subscriptions. The result was similar to a bleeding patient with no effective way to stop the blood loss and no way to replenish the loss with fresh supply.

During my tenure, I wrote two obituaries, one for my staff editor based in Munich, and an earlier one for a technical editor based in New Jersey. The last obit I wrote was for Electronics.

By the time I had finished my tale—I had provide more information than my caller had expected but I needed to tell the story throughly—I felt a need to help him find his issue of Electronics containing the Gordon Moore article. I told him I would send an e-mail to all those who had worked on the publication and asked if they had back issues or knew of someone who might have. I sent the e-mail out a couple of days ago to eight guys and received two replies. Four were returned undeliverable—I could attribute this to Hotmail, which has been flaky lately especially sending mail to aol addresses—but that would account for only one of the bounces. The truth is 1965 was a long time ago, for everyone except those who still remember what they were doing that year, like me.

March 3, 2005 – Confronting a sense of duty

March 3, 2005 – Confronting a sense of duty

As I approach sixty years on the face of the earth, I’ve come to recognize the folly that has accompanied me through time. When I turned twenty years old, I had thoughts of having forty years before I reached the point I am now in life. And as anyone with plenty of time, I spent those early years of my life as if I had all the time in the world. I continually wished days, months, years away, in fact, I wished the whole three and a half years of military service away. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy many of those days in those years, but when life was not going right for me, I wished the whole three and a half years would pass so that I could get away from what was my perceived servitude.

Servitude is a great way to characterize stretches of your life. When you are young you are forced to serve the will of elders around you—going to school at their behest, doing chores, getting along with people you do not like, all the obligations put upon young people. In my case, I left that servitude for the duties of the military—the U.S. Navy to be specific. While I was indentured—I signed a contract that allowed the military to order me about at their discretion—I was told what training classes to take, what my grade point average had to be, and where I would put that training to use once I had completed my studies. Sounds a lot like high school, right? but I did have the option of failing and going into an even more servile world of a deck hand aboard ship.

I applied myself and did what was expected of me. I did not fail but not from fear of ending up a deck hand. The sense of duty was not so much to the Navy as it was to my sense of self and my need not to fail. In looking back in my Navy records, I scored slightly above average in all the classes I took. When examinations were offered to advance in rank, I took them and passed, advancing through the ranks at the right pace for someone wanting to make the military their career. Once my contract had been fulfilled, however, I left the military, fully expecting that my sense of duty would have been sated. But, that was not the case. As I married, I realized that my sense of duty now became the family I had just committed to be part of. The contract I had signed had no term limit. It would remain in force for as long as I chose to observe the terms.

Just as before, I could opt to fail, to end the commitment by simple saying so, but I did not, perhaps could not, just as the sense of self made me want to succeed in my military obligation so to it encouraged me to make this new commitment thrive as well. Once the family grew from two people to four with the arrival of my two daughters, that sense of duty now extended to an extended group of young souls who had no choice in whether to join my wife “I” and me—talk about responsibility. I shudder to think of the number of days I wished away during this time. The days waiting for each of them to be born, the days one of them was ill and there was nothing we could do but wait for the fever to break, the medication to fend off the infection, the heartbreak each child felt at something as silly as not winning the “Meet Duran-Duran” contest a local radio station sponsored, and don’t get me started on puberty, not having a date for the junior and senior prom at the all-girls school both daughters attended, the heartbreak of not getting the lead in the senior play Guys and Dolls.

Now that all those days are gone, I’m reconciled to having lost them to my folly. In my youth, I had a misguided sense that at some point I could be free of obligation. With the birth of two daughters, I came to realize that life itself is an obligation, the duty to feed and clothe, minister to appetites, protect from harm. Now that I’ve spent those forty years I had that many years ago, I’m becoming far more stingy with my time. Now, I’m wringing every measure from every minute I walk the earth. Now, the minutes of life have more meaning.

March 2, 2005 – Realizing Huxley’s Brave New World

March 2, 2005 – Realizing Huxley’s Brave New World

I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in high school. I was captivated by the book and felt great affinity for the main character of the book, the young man called John (and “the Savage”). Huxley envisioned a futuristic world in which Ford had become the god that everyone worshipped. Children are born in test tubes and raised in nurseries by childcare professionals. Parents spent their days drugged on a regime of pharmaceuticals that regulate every aspect of their daily lives. Soma, the one most recognizable from the book, is a recreation escape drug, widely used by all. And as I recalled, every person was separated into classes by intelligence and ability. At the top of the order were the alphas, betas, etc.

Once the story describes the brave new world, with a center in London, the plot centers around the young man, John, born of a Beta-Minus named Linda of an Alpha father Tomakin, who is called Director in most of the book. Tomakin is the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, the man in charge of giving birth and raising the children of the Brave New World. The young man John is called the Savage for a good part of the book because of being born and raised on the Savage Reservation. Years before the story begins, Linda and Tomakin had been visiting the Savage Reservation in New Mexico when she got lost in the wild and abandoned by Tomakin. The inhabitants of Malpais, the name given the village by its inhabitance, rescued her. John, who would have otherwise been born in the hatchery in the civilized world, was born by natural childbirth in Malpais.

Brave New World is a study in alienation. John’s promiscuous mother Linda—promiscuity is the norm in the civilized world—is considered a harlot in the monogamous world of Malpais. Her insatiable appetite for Mescal—her substitute for Soma, which she dearly misses—and promiscuity causes the village to treat her and her son as outcasts from the mainstream of village life. Nevertheless, John grows up adopting the norms of the village. Years later, two visitors to Malpais, Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau and Lenina Crowne, his current female partner, discover Linda and John. When Mustapha Mond, The Resident Controller for Western Europe realizes that one of their own and her alpha-fathered offspring are in the Savage Reservation, he has Marx return them to London.

Once back in London, Linda quickly resumes her longed-for life, one filled with all the drugs needed to eliminate all her human suffering. John, who has been outcast by his mother’s behavior and their hair and skin color, in the village of Malpais, finds himself an even greater outcast in this civilized world that lacks all the elements of life he hold of value. The most poignant passage in the work reads as follows with John—the Savage beginning:

"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

As a young teenager, I identified so completely with the plight of the Savage for all the reason a young teenager feels alienated from the adult world that he or she cannot comprehend. And neither can that adult world understand the young person’s world, having been removed so long in time from it.

However, John’s alienation is one of being prevented from experiencing life, as he knew it growing up in Malpais. In the civilized world, all the inconveniences and discomforts that made life meaningful in Malpais has been eliminated. I’m beginning to see in our world the realization of Huxley’s fictional world. Science and technology are attempting to eliminate all the inconveniences and discomforts of our world. If you are an alpha in our world— loaded with money, there are surgical procedures that will eliminate fat, signs of age, unattractive features of the face and body. There are drugs that will take away pain, return lost libido, modify behavior—make you happy, reduce your euphoric states, etc. There are drugs that will enhance your physical performance, enable you to sleep, keep you awake, etc. Everything being produced in our modern culture is to make individuals less connected to the natural world.

Perhaps the reason Huxley picked Ford, as the god in his work was the U.S. industrialist was best known for mass producing automobiles and enabling “everyman” to own a car. There’s this great passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” that goes as follows:

"The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet... He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky..."

Modern contrivances, according to Emerson, have taken away our ability to do for ourselves in the world. This is what John,
(the savage), sees wrong with the civilized world and what we can likewise be moan of our own modern world.

I am guilty of being a practicing member of this modern world. I love cars and I have a collection of computers and other modern gadgets like cell phones, DVD players, and other electronic toys. As I’ve grown older, my memory has become less sharp and I find myself increasingly turning to Google and Yahoo to find information, rather than searching my own memory. I’m guilty of taking drugs, though far fewer than most of my contemporaries. I routinely refuse to fill prescriptions I’m given for painkillers and other medications to treat symptoms that will eventually go away of their own accord. After rereading parts of Brave New World, I plan to reexamine what I should be doing for mysel,f like simple math without a calculator.