June 30, 2005 – Observing The Return of Gifted Sons

June 30, 2005 – Observing The Return of Gifted Sons

Four years and three months after my first trip to Taiwan and other technology centers in Southeast Asia as a magazine editor, I was on my way again. I’m now the editor-in-chief of a technical magazine that covers integrated circuit software design tools and I'm also a shareholder in the small start-up publishing company that produces the monthly periodical. It’s a controlled circulation periodical—the readers receive it free in exchange for their demographic data, which we use to sell advertising space in the magazine. I’m here in the wake of having had the ignoble duty of closing my previous publication—a sixty-year old periodical that coined the term “Electronics.” I’m determined this new venture not suffer the same fate. We’ve been fortunate in that the market has continued to grow since 1995 when I first joined the company. There appears no end in sight as the semiconductor industry strives to keep up with demand generated in the wake of an explosion of Internet ventures. Little do we know we’re accelerating toward a cliff.

It’s Sunday September 7, 1997, I’m on United Airlines, Flight 845 bound for Chiang Kai-shek Airport, nonstop. The rationale for this trip was to find partnership opportunities with other publishers in Asia who might distribute our content or jointly publish a version of our magazine for the local market. I have three stops: Taiwan—with visits to Hsinchu—their Silicon Valley—and Taipei, where the publishers are; Singapore—we have a large advertiser there we want to treat nicely; and Tokyo—one of our investors is a Tokyo-based publishing company who we would like to engage for access to the Japan market.

Beyond the business reasons for the trip, for me this is a journey of self-discovery. I would be 52 years old in two months and I needed to understand how far I had come in life and where I should be heading. Going to Asia seemed a perfect way to find the answers to these questions. This revelation came to me nearly twenty years earlier. I had been helping the engineer who designed the original Pong Video Game—he sold low and was hoping for another chance at trying to sell high. He now had designed a piano tutor that would allow anyone to sit at a standard piano keyboard and play. In trying to find funding and a manufacturer, we kept running into Hong Kong money and production capacity. Over the years, the emergence of Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, India, and China as high quality offshore manufacturing capacity, clearly indicated that wealth creation was moving to Asia.

When I landed in Taiwan, there was a car waiting to drive me to the Carleton Hotel. HC, an executive at one of the companies my magazine covered and his Sales Representative in Taiwan, TS, had produced my itinerary in Hsinchu and had made reservations and arranged transportation with the Carleton Hotel. Shortly after I arrive and get checked into my room HC and TS knock on my door and invite me down for dinner. It was just after 8:00 PM on Monday evening, September 8th. I had eaten but wanted the company of familiar faces and joined them. (In a couple of years both these guys would become a major part of my life.) We talked for a couple of hours about the next day’s visits, progress of our respective businesses, the latest happenings in Taiwan, and gossip about those we know in common.

HC recounts the story of traveling to Beijing when he was VP of marketing at his previous company. He was placed under house arrest at the airport overnight as they checked him out. Kafka came to mind as he relayed details of his detention. HC is a pretty tough guy. Built like a football player—he played in high school—he has a body builder’s torso. Before immigrating to the states, he attended military school in Taiwan. His description reminded me of my weeks in Navy boot camp. Only his entire adolescent school life seemed to be regimented by the Martinet we had for drill instructors. I knew less about TS and still do. He owned a small distribution company that sold design tools used to develop semiconductors. He had close to 20 salesmen—and all were men—working for him. He was an investor in HC’s company and drove a nice relatively new Japanese 4-door sedan.

I need to say something about Hsinchu Science-Based Park, which is a creation of the Taiwan Government. In 1976, the Financial and Economic Development Committee of the Executive Yuan—the executive branch of the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan)—decided to establish Science Park. The government set aside land, built schools to serve the park, and provided incentives to encourage high tech companies to take up residence. Founded in 1980, semiconductor foundry giant UMC was Taiwan's first chip company and an early resident of the park. Its larger rival TSMC, another park resident, moved in seven years later. (The two companies and their partially owned affiliates were among those I was visiting the following day.) The park and the Taiwan Government’s investment is an example of corporate and human capital investment that created incredible wealth for a small island.

Beyond the Taiwan government there is one other element that made the park so incredibly successful, the return of expatriates from the U.S. to ride this wave of growth. Of the top executives of the largest semiconductor company in the park, all but two have advanced degrees from U.S. universities: two each from Stanford and U.C. Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Illinois-Urbana, Purdue, Cornell, Columbia, and Missouri. Only two of these top execs lack a PhD and all the PhDs are in science and technology. And of those with U.S. educations, most of their bios show years of management positions in top U.S. electronics companies. The brightest and the best went to the U.S., acquired a top-notch education, honed their management skills enriching U.S. investors and themselves. Now, they had returned to Taiwan to repeat the feat, with Americans now working for them. In one generation, the apprentice became the master. And most of the large companies in the park had the same management composition.

HC, who had left Taiwan as a teenager, had now come back, his rusty command of Mandarin returning as the number and length of his visits increased. He relayed his embarrassment when attempting his first presentation in Mandarin. Less than a minute into his pitch, his very small audience suggested he continue in English. After that first encounter he honed his language skills and now dazzles me by switching effortlessly between Mandarin and English as he speaks with TS and me. He is among the next generation of ex-patriots to return to the island. The return was made easier by the westernization that had swept across the island. The U.S. has nothing that cannot be found on Taiwan. HC is twenty years my junior and it is his time and he is well equipped to ride the growing wave of Asian affluence.

During my visits to companies inside the park, I would enter marble-floored, glass and chrome appointed lobbies, some with water fountains and other displays of affluence. Arrayed before me were the trappings of new wealth, the symbols of companies who build product for a continually expanding market. Companies in the U.S. did the same over two decades earlier but steadily rising costs made offshore facilities like these in Hsinchu Science Park, with lower wage rates, cheaper land, water, and power more competitive than equivalent manufacturing facilities in the states. I realized that every U.S. high tech worker was competing with Taiwan engineers and programmers for jobs. Our advertisers would pay dearly to reach these workers if we could demonstrate they were reading our publication.

HC took me to dinner on Tuesday evening. I had dinner at the hotel by myself on Wednesday. And Thursday, TS, drove me from Hsinchu to Taipei, took me to dinner, and afterwards dropped me at the Hyatt Hotel where I would stay until Saturday morning. Friday was the day I visited a publisher who we thought might be interested in partnering to distribute our editorial and split the advertising revenue from the joint venture. Sitting alone in my room after dinner on Saturday night at the elegant Hyatt Hotel in Taipei, I realized that the world was moving at a breakneck pace, Below me the lights of Taipei were ablaze—the high rises were all constructed during my adult life many in the four-year interval since my last visit.

I have been aware for some time that I have spent my life as an observer of what was going on around me, writing about the success that others enjoyed as well as the failures they suffered. With the demise of my last publication I had to become a participant not just an observer, which explains my trip and my concern for appeasing customers and a desire to leverage partnerships with other publishers. However, in my discussions with companies the last couple of days, I realize that wealth resided in high tech not in the publishing companies that wrote about them. The dilemma I faced was continuing in publishing or jump into the real world of creating and building what I had been writing about for these past couple of decades. HC would help make that decision for me just over two years later.

What I found in Singapore and in Japan in future entries.

June 28 2005 – Making The Final Deadline, Just Barely

June 28 2005 – Making The Final Deadline, Just Barely

When I first went to work for Electronic Design magazine in 1980, I was given the test and measurement beat. I covered companies such as Zehntel, GenRad, Teradyne, Hewlett Packard, Tektronix, Keithley Instruments, Biomation, and other names that escape me. Those listed had good public relations; those not probably didn’t. The other observation I’ll make about this list is that some of the names no longer exist—discarded in the wake of an acquisition; their names remembered by old guys like me. Finally, a look at the companies who still exist will inform the tech-business-aware reader that the companies were scattered all over the country: Northern California, Boston and its suburbs, Cleveland, the metropolitan areas surrounding Denver, and Beaverton, Oregon.

I was the test and measurement guy because I was the junior person on the staff and this category of electronic equipment is the least glamorous. The mention of oscilloscope and logic analyzer is sufficient to glaze over any normal person’s eyes. I found them interesting because for the earliest part of my professional life I used these instruments to troubleshoot malfunctioning computers and communications gear. What the X-Ray and CT Scanner are to doctors, test equipment is to an electronics technician. I had been covering the beat for the good part of a year when I asked to expand my beat to include computers and peripherals. Back then the number of new disk drive, printer, and computer companies being formed was too numerous to count.

By 1981, LA who had been editor of the magazine was now publisher. The new chief editor was LM, one of the few women editors of a technical publication at the start of the 1980s. LM had two executive editors, SR and SC. There was probably another but these three really drove the publication. LM gave me the go-ahead to take on the computer and peripheral beat and also asked me to look into the emerging communications market. Telephone companies were deploying fiber optical cable at a record rate. She also said she was about to make an offer to another editor who would take over the T&M beat. In the meantime finish up any projects and move on. The new editor would be on board ahead of the Wescon Show, a conference and trade show that moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco and happened the last week of September. It was 1981 and Wescon was held in San Francisco. I had been with the magazine for just over a year.

LM had hired the new editor almost a month before the conference and had given him the assignment to produce a special report on large test equipment systems sold to semiconductor chip makers and printed circuit board manufacturers. Twenty years ago, the printed circuit board manufacturing was still found in abundance in high tech centers of this country: California, Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, Florida, Oregon and Washington. Now, it’s largely moved off shore to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and now China. Test equipment manufacturers might not be perceived as glamorous but they certainly were major advertisers and Electronic Design was the magazine that reached the demographic these large companies wanted.

Magazine editors, those that I’ve known over time, are an eccentric lot. Most have a wide range of interests. One of my favorite editors of all times is BR, a man who reminds me of Hunter Thompson in manner of dress, sans sunglasses and attitude. BR was a nice nerd and a gentleman. In terms of technical knowledge he was the equal of any working engineer in the field of broadcast communications—he understood the world of analog, which might account for his eccentricity. Digital is very deterministic. The result is always a “1” or a “0”. Analog is full of maybes. Like most editors, a gray flannel suit. Gucci loafers, and a designer tie did not fit him well. And neither was he fluent in the language—one full of overused superlatives. The language editors speak and tend to have few if any of the same words. Editors like BR tend to be contrarians with a suspicion of any claim of first, best, etc.

However, in trade publishing, editors are commodities marketed along with the circulation of the magazine. This is a natural result of giving away editorial and charging for access to the reader demographic the magazine reaches, the business model of all controlled circulation magazines. Advertisers pay all the cost of producing and distributing a trade magazine. (What remains once all these costs are covered is profit.) And editors are overhead, who increasingly have had to do more than interview contacts, attend press briefings, and write stories. Their role was beginning to include promoting the magazine to advertisers and media buyers within advertising agencies. Some are up to the task, others not. BR, for example, took a turn at it with some success.

In addition to schmoozing advertisers, editors are called into service to be industry luminaries, experts who appear on or moderate panels at trade shows. At every conference I’ve attended there are a handful of editors—typically the magazines’ chief editors, who are making presentations or moderating or participating on panels held at these events, Those who are not good at it—the natural introverts who speak through their written words you’ll find in the press room rummaging through press releases, interviewing company spokespeople, industry analysts, or experts in the field.

There are a few editors I’ve known—the number I can count on one hand—who are more reclusive than their peers, who like working from home. After years of building up a reputation as a “good” editor they can bestow or debunk a manufacturer’s claim and have the readers take notice. These few come and go as they please as long as they make their deadlines and produce compelling editorial. LM had put her new hire—I’ll call him Herb, not his real name—into that category: eccentric editor who produced copy on deadline and did most of his interviewing by phone—back then e-mail was non-existent. However, he started missing deadlines—the first no one noticed, the second raised a red flag. But most upsetting of all was he couldn’t be reached by phone, at which point LM started getting really worried.

She turned to the human resources department at the company to find where Herb lived in Southern California. He was hired to work out of the magazine’s office near LAX, but told her he could work from home most days. He had never gone into the office, thus no one had any idea of whom this person was. Only LM and SR had ever met him during their face-to-face interview nearly two months before. Human resources did manage to locate a next of kin, his daughter, who LM finally reached and the awful truth was finally revealed. Herb had a nervous breakdown and was under a doctor’s care. By this time, all the deadlines had passed. Now, the magazine had been composed and there was a hole where Herb’s article was to go.

I got the call from LM on Friday the weekend before the magazine was to be sent out for film the following Monday. She said, “I’ll pay you real money to produce 4000 words with three color picture over the weekend. She said she needed the copy and pictures by Monday morning. Could I do it? I said I could. I was familiar with the topic. In the run up to Wescon, I had been contacted by the product managers of a number of T&M companies. They wanted me to come by and see what they were doing. Rather than refer them to the new guy, I said I would listen to their pitch but they also needed to tell their story to Herb. These were all contacts I had cultivated over time and I wanted to accommodate them. I never knew when I would be back on the T&M beat. I had a notebook of good interviews detailing all the latest developments on the newest machines from the major players.

After our traditional Friday family dinner—IM and I and the two girls went to the Lion & Compass in Sunnyvale, I went to the den and began cranking out double-spaced, typewritten copy from a Smith Corona electric typewriter. By Sunday evening I had LM’s 4000 words on 15 double-spaced typewritten, Snopaked pages. In addition I had two 4-by-5 color transparent of new printed circuit board testers, and one 8-by-10 color print of a brand new semiconductor tester. A 9-by-12-in. brown envelope contained my weekend’s work and color photography sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard. I had drug-store copies of the originals at home as well as back-up color pictures if by some twist of fate the package failed to arrive at EWR, Newark International Airport 20 miles from the magazine’s New Jersey headquarters at 50 Essex Street in Rochelle Park at 9:00 AM Monday morning. LM planned to be at the baggage claim area waiting for the package when it arrived.

I was on my way to SFO at about 10:30 Sunday evening, October 4, 1981. Forty minutes later I parked in short-term parking on the other side of the access road from the terminal and walked across the pedestrian sky bridge to the ticket counter of United Air Lines. I purchased a $50 ticket for my small brown package and the ticket agent put it on the conveyor belt bound for United Airline Flight 136 departing midnight nonstop for EWR. The agent then gave me a receipt and I went home to enjoy what was left of my weekend—about six hours sleep. I was up at 7:00 AM, on Monday morning. When I got into the office I called and LM confirmed the package had arrived and that SR was busy getting it edited and ready for shipment: crisis averted. We never found out what became of Herb.

June 27, 2005 The Road Less Traveled By

June 27, 2005 The Road Less Traveled By

When I walked off the U.S. Navy Base at Treasure Island on November 25th 1966, I felt a great responsibility lifted from my shoulders. I had been discharged from active duty in the U.S. Navy and placed on inactive reserve for two years. I had just completed my military obligation to the United States as spelled out by the Selective Service System. I had called my high school friend RA who had promised to pick me up and put me up at his place until December 1st, the day after my 21st birthday. I was now free to do all the things I dreamt about doing while I was serving in the Navy. One of the first was to use the GI Bill to go through college. A second was to marry and start a family. I had had enough of the rootless life of a bachelor, drinking in bars with others like me, exploring new places with no one to share the experience with except that other person who inhabits my mind and converses with me continuously. He is someone to talk with when no one around you seems interesting.

RA and I celebrated my 21st birthday in a bar on South First Street in San Jose, California where West Reed Street T's into South First just north of the Interstate 280 overpass. For the past 30 years I've been driving by the bar, which surely must have changed hands countless times over the years. RA, his two roommates the three were sharing an apartment near San Jose State University on South Fourth Street, and me. We entered the bar right after midnight and asked to be served. I think I ordered a beer. The bartender carded us all and when he came to me, he looked at my driver's license then looked at the clock on the wall behind the bar, smiled and served us our drinks. Everyone got a great laugh out of the moment, watching a rite of passage achieving the milestone of 21 years on the face of the earth. I had been drinking in bars legally for the last two year I was in the Navy. In Japan, the bars all served me without questioning my age. Before that I lived for four months in New Hyde Park on Long Island while attending a school for the Navy. The drinking age in New York then was eighteen. Arriving at my 21st birthday, however, enfranchised me anywhere in the world to drink.

However, it wasn't about the right to drink in bars strange that the symbol of adulthood is going to a place where you can act like an adolescent. It was about the significance of crossing this personal Rubicon. There was no turning back. I was an adult, subject to all the responsibilities as well as the benefits that state of being confers the benefits I would have to wait to enjoy as I quickly found out after the night of celebrating my coming of age. Sitting drinking in that bar, my inner voice kept bringing up the fact that I had no job and, though going to college was a great idea, without financial resources intellectual pursuits would have to be put on hold. I had considered staying in California but had decided to take my travel allowance and return to El Paso. Being unable to go home all those years before left me with a desire to return. I had left to be away from the duties and responsibilities my position as oldest son placed on me. I had always felt a sense of guilt for leaving. It mixed with the homesickness everyone experiences being away from home the first time. I had to return to exorcise both before leaving for good.

When I returned home, I got a job at the Post Exchange on Ft Bliss Army Base, and completed my application to attend the University of Texas at El Paso in the spring 1967 semester. Being a resident of Texas, the tuition would be lower than anywhere else in the country. The campus had just opened on the campus of Texas Western University, a school devoted to teaching the discipline of mining. My high school friend HR had just graduated UTEP with a degree in Business Administration. He had applied for and received acceptance into the management program offered to the Army and Air Force Exchange Service the retail outlet that provide department store goods and services to active duty and retired military personnel at discount prices. At one time the discounts were considerably lower than available in stores off base. Now with huge retailers such as Walmart, Target, and others, the discounts are not nearly as large. HR was recommended by the branch manager in charge of the annex where HR and I both worked. His professional life seemed well on its way until he got the word from the selective service that his deferment was ended and he was en route to Viet Nam. With his college degree, HR would make a detour first to Officer Training School before deployment.

Thus as I was starting the journey to the place in life where HR had arrived, HR was beginning the sojourn I had just completed. Only his would be filled with far more danger than mine. I often thought of how I had envied HR getting a draft deferment and completing college. Now, as I saw the fate that awaited him I realized that my choice'to get my military obligation out of the way before thinking about the rest of my life had kept me out of harm's way. I've always felt that I was out of step with those around me. It was something that would characterize the rest of my life. Whenever I came upon a major decision in my life, I would recall the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken." I love the first line: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood." Looking back over time, I can't remember how many divergent paths I've come upon and taken. Funny thing is I keep coming upon them. When I entered UTEP, I listed my major to be English. I would eventually graduate with a degree in economics. In between my freshman year at UTEP and acquiring my degree from the University of Texas at Arlington a suburb midway between Dallas and Ft Worth, I would have gotten married, worked a year in a suburb of Washington DC, and had two lovely daughters: starting a family and beginning a career at the same time, though officially the career began after receiving my degree in 1974, when we moved from Dallas to San Jose.

When I recall HR, I'm reminded of the Edward Arlington Robinson poem Richard Cory, not so much as a metaphor for what happened to HR, but rather the notion that you never truly know what goes on within the mind of those close to us.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

I had known HR for half of my school years. Both our families had been and remain close to one another. Though HR was temperamental, no one thought him anything but normal. He was someone who excelled at what he undertook, in sports, school, and at work, the pillar of responsibility and level-headedness. But somewhere in Officer Training School, something broke inside him and he dropped out. Back then dropping out of OCS was a ticket to the front lines in Viet Nam, which is exactly where HR ended up.

Miraculously, HR survived Viet Nam and was discharged after serving his time. However, when he got out whatever emotional injury he received in OCS was made worse on the battlefield. He came back a head case unable to hold down a job. Eventually, he had an altercation at a gas station in Van Horne, Texas while returning to El Paso. He landed in jail and eventually into the Veteran Administration hospital in Waco, Texas. He was placed on a psychotic drug regime and told not to drink. He would periodically fall off the wagon and end up first in jail, then back in Waco. A life of promise turned into one without. HR went to Viet Nam and never came back, repeatedly living whatever nightmare he dreamt while there. I've spoken to him on occasion when I return home to visit my family. He lives nearby. I asked him what his days were like and he said watching a lot of TV and trying to keep from drinking. He has his group sessions where he meets others with the same problem and he's taken to attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And he's been on the wagon for the longest time I can remember. Maybe in the Autumn of his life, he'll find the peace that eluded through the other seasons.

June 26, 2005 – Spinning Apple to the Press 1978

June 26, 2005 – Spinning Apple to the Press 1978

It’s a little before 9:00 AM on Sunday, April 16, 1978. I’m aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 842 departing SFO en route to JFK for a weeklong press tour. These tours have become part of my life at Regis McKenna Advertising and Public Relations, where I’m an account executive. I’m traveling with FR, a new marketing director at the agency’s one home computer client, Apple, one of three competitors—PET and Radio Shack TRS80 the others—vying to sell computers into the “home market,” which included anyone buying a computer for personal use. We’re visiting trade magazines in Manhattan, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Boston. I’m looking back through my “Week at a Glance” appointment book for 1978 and the 9½ by 6 inch notebook I carried with at all times. The notebook was and remains the diary of my everyday life.

The week before the trip, a notebook entry on April 12th shows that I changed the Sunday April 16th reservation at the Hotel St. Regis in Manhattan—the agency’s hotel of choice in the city—from a suite to two single rooms and that I booked my traveling companion and me at the Philadelphia Sheraton Hotel for the evening of Monday April 17th. My notes also indicate that we would depart SFO for JFK on Sunday morning, spend Monday in Manhattan, fly to Philadelphia on Monday evening—no flight details for the trip to Philly, where we would spend all of Tuesday and fly to Boston on Allegheny Airlines Flight 26 that evening. We were scheduled to return from Boston's Logan Airport to LaGuardia on Wednesday evening—most likely on the Eastern Airline Shuttle, returning to the St. Regis and two more days of visits in and around Manhattan.

We arrived just after 5:00 Sunday evening, rented a car, drove into Manhattan and checked into the St Regis. Once we got settled we decided to go out for dinner. As we boarded the elevator we came face to face with three people already inside. The one man in the middle of the three-some was humming a Beatles tune. He gazed at us as we entered and asked if we knew the name of the song. I was stunned not by the request but by the man making the request. It was Salvador Dali, himself with a woman companion—his wife Gala, no doubt—and another man. All three were stylishly dressed but the only one I remember was Dali. The St. Regis is the original Beaux Arts classic landmark Colonel John Jacob Astor IV built in 1904, and was home to a number of international celebrities including Dali and his wife Gala. I said I didn’t know the song title and then asked aren’t you Salvador Dali? He nodded and I offered to shake his hand and he reciprocated. I said my name and how pleased I was to share the elevator with him. By the time the exchange was completed, the elevator had reached the ground floor and we all departed with a cordial “enjoy your evening.” FR and I left for dinner at the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 E 53rd Street; something the doorman suggested when we checked in. (It has since become my favorite restaurant in Manhattan.)

Public relations is about managing events: setting up appointments, getting their on time, exploiting the commitments that result from the meetings, and following up to ensure the commitments that both sides make are fulfilled. (For making all this happen with a minimum of conflict and aggravation to the client, a good account executive could charge $50/hour to $100/hour depending on seniority.) We had three meetings on Monday. The first was 9:30 with Bill Hawkings, Electronics Editor with Popular Science Magazine at 380 Madison Avenue. The second was with Don Mennie, Associate Editor, of IEEE Spectrum Magazine at 345 East 47th Street. The third—and the reason we needed the rental car—was with Larry Altman, Editor of Electronic Design at 50 Essex Street in Rochelle Park, New Jersey.

At each of these stops, FR would roll out his color-slide, flip chart presentation in a 3-ring notebook. We had slides to be displayed on an overhead projector for a large audience. He went through his prepared remarks announcing the new BASIC Language Programming Manual being made available to all Apple owners—copies were made available to each editor requesting a copy as well. From there the presentation recapped existing peripheral product for our home computer, a new floppy disk drive that turned the computer into a device anyone could use rather than the hobbyist that had been the primary buyer until now. The combination of the BASIC Language Programming Manual and the floppy disk meant a whole new breed of user had now been enfranchised: game and program developers who had a medium—the floppy disk—they could use to sell their work. And the number who did just that exploded in the wake of the announcement. Computer retail outlets and computer faires all over the country began seeing 5¼-in. floppy disks containing every conceivable game and end application program—checkbook, recipe, etc. available for purchase.

We completed our presentations in the Manhattan area, drove back to the JFK, returned the rental car and made a 6:45 PM flight to Philadelphia to attend the Mini Micro Show going on at the Philadelphia Civic Center Conference Facility along University Avenue in Philadelphia. It’s gone now, demolished in 2001. After paying our $30 fee each to get into the conference, we met with Andy Santoni of Electronic Design Magazine and editors from EDN Magazine and Electronic Engineering Times magazines. We also managed to get in front of Gene Castellano of the Philadelphia News Daily, and Dick Pothier of the Philadelphia Enquirer. Trade show meetings are the toughest to plan because people invariably get tied up and run late or have last minute changes in their plans and fail to show. We were lucky. All our meetings happened though some not with the editors we had expected.

The great marketing problem for my home computer client was understanding who the typical buyer of the machine was. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that most of the buyers were engineers and programmers who were using the low-cost computers to control some electromechanical equipment—soft drink dispensers, gasoline pumps, the list goes on. Smart people simply used the computers to solve problems that larger more expensive machines previously made prohibitive. Some solutions lent themselves to mass production—gasoline pumps, others—controlling cameras in action movies—didn’t. The other buyers were programmers who were creating software. The most successful early application program was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, two college students in Boston. It turned the home computer into a personal computer—a productivity tool for a whole generation of MBA middle managers in every major corporation in the U.S. and Europe. The machines were cheap enough that individuals could buy them like they would an expensive Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments calculator—what they had been using until VisiCalc came along.

To reach this broad undefined market, the PR campaign had to be as extensive as possible. Thus, we were meeting with tech magazines like those on Monday and Tuesday. Now, Tuesday evening as we flew into Boston Logan Airport we were planning to meet on Wednesday with software magazines read by programmers working with far more expensive minicomputers and mainframes: Computerworld and Datamation. Of the two we were able to meet with Frank Vaughn, Assistant Editor of Computerworld at 797 Washington Street in Newton, Mass. We then drove to Boston for an extended meeting with EDN and Electronic Business at their headquarters on 221 Columbus Avenue. This meeting would end up with FR getting them a computer to evaluate for a couple of months, something the magazine was known for back then. An article or series of articles would result, some not always saying what the company wanted to hear. We finished the day visiting with Computer Design 11 Goldsmith Street in Littleton, Mass. my alma mater, meeting with John Camuso, my old boss.

That evening we flew back to New York and returned to the St Regis, where Regis himself was in residence. He was in the city to meet with the major business publications. He and I spoke briefly by phone but otherwise, he went his way and FR and I went ours. Thursday morning we had another schedule that had us running in and out of the city. The first was with CMP Publications, then based at 333 East Shore Road in Manhasset on Long Island. We met with two different magazines: John Tsantes, Editor, and Margie Stengler, Assistant Editor at Electronic Engineering Times and Richard Hoffmann, Managing Editor and Steve Gray, Assistant Editor at Computer Systems News—a great newspaper that thrived in the early days of the home computer/personal computer market. These meetings resulted in another request for a computer to evaluate, something I would be pulled into expediting in the following weeks. The day concluded back in Manhattan with a meeting at Consumer Electronics Monthly, on 327 East 75th Street, with Associate Editor, Jane LeFevre.

Friday we had two meetings that ended the week. We met with Neil Shapiro, Technical Editor at Elementary Electronics at 229 Park Avenue South in the city at 9:30. Next we moved on to Popular Mechanics Magazine at 224 W. 57th Street where we met with Steve Walton Contributing Editor. With these magazines, we hoped to reach the broad general public to build awareness of computers among the masses. These were the traditional magazines that covered the latest consumer audio and video components. The home computer was yet another consumer electronics device every home had to have—that was our pitch. It was a long week that ended on a long flight back and late arrival into San Francisco. Fridays were and remain the worst days to fly because everyone else is doing the same thing.

Every trip is a journey of discovery. For me, each one taught me that my limits were always just beyond my latest striving. This one was no different. I had managed to keep the schedule, managed to get everyone excited about working on some project together. The client was happy and I had just created 20 or so new tasks I had to complete before the individuals who had committed to the tasks lost interest in them. Journalists notoriously have a short attention span. I would have to begin work over the weekend getting some letters written to follow up our visits and confirm in writing what everyone had agreed to verbally. If commitments are not on paper they don’t exist. In the larger picture, the client was getting what he wanted and needed, awareness among the media, which would ultimately translate into awareness among the masses.

June 21, 2005 – Dunvegan Castle: Peering into the Past

June 21, 2005 – Dunvegan Castle: Peering into the Past

The Dunvegan Hotel sits on the side of a hill overlooking Loch Dunvegan. We had arrived at the hotel around 4:30 in the afternoon, which gave just enough time for a brisk walk before dinner. For our jaunt, we choose to walk the mile between the hotel and the castle grounds. Along the road, we notice several houses on our left, each sufficiently spaced from the other to experience a rural setting rather than a suburban one. Near the castle grounds, the growth of trees and foliage increases so much so that the setting sun off to our left is blocked from view. Looking onto the grounds we see growths of flowers and plants, all colorful in their summer dress. Arriving at the castle gate we notice the long walkway leading to the castle entrance and in the distance we can see above the forest a portion of the castle turret. It is a pleasant, romantic view.

We stay only for a few minutes taking pictures and looking about at the growths of trees and brush. On our way back to the hotel, we pass once more the houses and notice cattle grazing in one of the fields we pass. This is in contrast to the countless number of sheep we have so far seen. We arrive back at the hotel in time for dinner and I am struck by how high in the sky the sun still is. Dinner is enjoyable and afterwards I go alone down to the edge of the Loch behind the hotel for a moment of peace and quiet.

If there is one aspect of Skye that I most treasure it is its peace and quiet. As I walk along the water's edge with my camera as my companion, I am struck by the lack of any sound save the sound of the water lapping the shore. In the distance, the sun is still high in the western sky playing capriciously with the remnants of clouds left over from the earlier rain. The result of their game is a beautiful reflection of bright orange and red on the waters of the loch. By now it is nearly eight o'clock and there is still no sign the sun will ever set. I cannot help but think how nice it must be to sit beside the Loch and watch for hours the sun painting its fiery picture's in the western sky.

Behind the hotel, there is a small boathouse near the edge of the saltwater loch. Walking toward the little structure, I am struck by the smell of the plant life and seaweed washed up on shore beside it. The odor is not unpleasant rather one that makes you acutely aware that you are near the sea. Gazing at the water and boathouse I notice the abandoned hull of a boat near the water's edge as well as the lone image of another boat anchored a few yards offshore, I am struck at the scene: a perfect painting or in my case a photograph that will fail to capture the enormity of the scene.

Leaving the boathouse at around nine o'clock, I notice the sun still lingering in the distant western sky still casting an early evening glow on the countryside about the hotel. From the boathouse, I join my father- and mother-in-law at the Ceilidh—Gaelic for festive gathering—in a large open room next to the hotel, used by the locals. At one end of the room was a bar and at the other a small stage for the musicians. Entering the room, I hear an accordion’s playful tune.

Around the perimeter of the room were chairs filled with singing tourists and locals, an atmosphere that gave the room its life. It was as if everyone there belonged to the small community contained in the room. The songs and the music served as a link between all within. Strangers though we were it helped make us familiar to one another. This was helped by the friendliness of the locals who nightly gathered for the Ceilidh and who made the music for the songs being sung. We all left the Ceilidh around 11:30 that night and as I made my way out the door, I could not help but be amazed at the remnants of orange sun still visible on the western horizon.

The next morning we woke early and made our way to the dining room for breakfast. The first to arrive we had the dining room to ourselves except the hotel staff. Again, we noticed the absolute quiet that filled the room and the space outside the hotel. It was almost wrong to speak and break the lovely silence. Our dining room hostess told us she was a MacLeod. She described her kilt as the hunting tartan of the Clan MacLeod. She mentioned that Portree was the place to buy woolens and listed two places that were particularly good places to shop.

Slowly the room filled with other guests and the sound of conversation. After breakfast, we loaded the car and drove up to the castle a short time before it was scheduled to open. We toured the grounds and found a picturesque little stream to the side of the castle and noted how terribly tall and ominous the castle appeared from the side facing onto Loch Dunvegan.

When the castle opened, we made our tour through its interior with walls that were covered with larger than life portraits of clan leaders and their wives. These belongings gave a sense of the longevity of a family whose ancestry goes back to around the 12th century.

When we left what struck me about the castle was its ability to endure in the face of modern progress. This artifact, built hundreds of years ago, represented a way of life long since past. In its day it relied on an army of servants to run and maintain. Over time the cost of maintaining that workforce became uneconomical. The analogy would be trying to use a 1930s model T Ford as your commute car in 2005. The consumer culture of the modern world has a difficult time dealing with anything that requires a great deal of preservation and upkeep, something left up to a foundation, museum or government agency. For a family to shoulder the burden is remarkable. It is a testament to individual will.

June 20, 2005 – Homecoming: The Isle of Skye

June 20, 2005 – Homecoming: The Isle of Skye

I have a collection of photos from a trip my wife IM, my two daughters ME and RD, and I made in 1978. IM and the girls departed San Francisco International at 8:00 PM on June 1st, aboard British Airways flight 286. I left on the same flight on June 16th to join them. I would be gone three weeks, one of the longest vacations I’ve ever taken—though in reality a couple of days would be spent working. I was then employed at the Regis McKenna Advertising and Public Relations agency in Palo Alto as the account executive for Apple Computer and Intel Corp. The agency’s PR operation was small, three AEs reporting directly to Regis, which made a trip such as my family and I were taking possible. I had asked Regis if I could go and check out the Intel operation in Brussels and the UK and he said yes—with good reason since he was being asked to expand into Europe to support his clients’ growing international business.

I arrived on British Airways flight 286 into Heathrow just before noon on Saturday June 17th and had a few hours lay over before I caught a British European Airways flight to Glasgow at 2:00 PM in the afternoon. IM met my plane and we took a cab back to her parent’s home in Condorrat, where we would spend the weekend before our journey would begin. Right after I arrived we rented a Volvo station wagon, ideal for hauling our two small daughters—ME was then 10 years old and RD almost 7 years old, IM’s parents, and IM and me.

Scotland had more claim on our two daughters than me with my Highland surname. They were one half Scottish from their mother, who had been born less than thirty miles from where we were staying of hearty, generations-old, Scottish stock. Our daughters’ genes were from those Scots who sporadically battled their English neighbors for nearly a thousand years, with armed conflict giving way to political battles in more recent times. In the last major military conflict, the English emerged victorious in 1746, when the Duke of Cumberland put down the Jacobite Revolt. In the aftermath, the Highland Clearances gained momentum and by 1773 resulted in 20,000 highlanders emigrating to Canada and the Southern United States, the ancestor bearing my surname perhaps among them.

The Saturday evening I arrived, we had unexpected guests show up at IM’s parent’s home in Condorrat, a female workmate of mine from the agency DM and her traveling companion, a woman of the same age, though a bit taller. A couple of weeks earlier, I had casually mentioned to DM at the agency that I was staying in Condorrat with IM’s parents and if she were backpacking through Scotland during her vacation to stop by. It was the kind of remark you never expect anyone to take you up on, but here they were knocking on the door. My mother-in-law was beside herself with glee to have American visitors knocking on her door. IM was beside herself for another reason—annoyed that I had invited someone (especially a female someone) from the states to visit us in Scotland. My workmate, a lovely young woman starting out her professional career asked if she and her friend could spend the night—they had their own sleeping bags. My mother-in-law said of course they were welcome.

The following morning DM and her friend were off to the next stop on their rail-pass tour of the UK and Europe. I have a picture of the two of them at the train station. My youngest daughter RD is in the picture with DM on her right and DM’s friend on her left. The three are standing at the left of the Volvo’s open rear door with the train tracks in the background. RD had insisted on coming with me when I drove the two to the train station and she had insinuated herself in the picture when I asked the two to pose before leaving. I think RD was taken with two young women wandering about Europe on their own.

On Monday June 19th we began our trip north to the Isle of Skye. We made our first stop at the Stage House Inn in the town of Glenfinnan, arriving just before dinner. The Inn is now called the Prince’s House Hotel. ME and RD had their own room and they would tell us the following morning of waking in the night and searching together for the bathroom outside their room. The Inn was completely engulfed in darkness and a silence that was unnerving to suburbanites accustomed to street noises and lights. The two managed to find the bathroom and to return to their room without waking anyone in the process. IM did not report any experience of otherworldliness, a surprise because of her acute sixth sense. To illustrate, I remember her waking one morning describing a dream in which she saw a car accident on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto near the entrance to the Hewlett Packard Campus. Later that day IM and I met with a business associate of mine from the UK who we were taking into San Francisco for dinner that night. He recounted having a fender bender near the entrance to the HP facility on Page Mill Road.

That IM had no similar dream during our stay at the Stage House was a surprise since the Inn has been around since 1658, standing in mute witness to hundreds of years of history, including the start and end of the aborted Jacobite Revolt that sought to restore James VIII of Scotland and III of England, to the throne of England. The deposed king’s son Bonnie Prince Charlie entered Scotland from France at Loch Nan Uamh, near Arisaig some miles west of Glenfinnan before making his way to Glenfinnan by a roundabout route. On Monday 19 August 1745 a small boat carrying the prince landed at the north end of Loch Shiel just south of Glenfinnan. He stayed with a small number of supporters in a barn nearby waiting for word from Highland clans rallying to his cause. Eventually he raised his standard in Glenfinnan. Today there’s a monument where the standard once stood—a stone tower surmounted by a statue of a kilted highlander (not the prince himself as is often thought).

Less than a year from its inception, at Cullodin, the English under the Duke of Cumberland brutally put down the rebellion the Prince began. On April 20, 1746, the Prince retreated to the region around Glenfinnan eventually setting off for the Outer Hebrides. On Sunday 29th June 1746 Dame Flora MacDonald took the Prince by small boat from the Outer Hebrides to what is now known as Prince Charles's Point north of Uig on the Isle of Skye. He would leave Skye for the Scottish mainland and elude the English forces until September 19th when he boarded a ship back to France.

Next morning after a hearty breakfast, we left Glenfinnan and drove west on the A830 passing Loch Nan Uamh along the way eventually ending at Maillaig. There we queued up the Volvo to catch the ferry to Skye. We had an hour or so to wait and the girls, IM, and I wandered about Maillaig near the ferry dock sightseeing in the misty overcast morning. IM’s mom and dad retired to a nearby pub to relax. The pictures I have of the crossing show blue-jacketed ME and red-jacketed RD standing on deck posing singly and with their grandfather—their cold-reddened cheeks and bright smiles enlivening the overcast day. We arrived at Armadale an hour or so later and the kids and I set foot on the Isle of Skye for the first time. We drove north along the one-lane A851 eventually reaching Broadford where we stopped and called ahead to the Dunvegan Hotel for reservations—three rooms.

After Broadford, the A851 T’s into the two-lane A87 and we head northwest toward Dunvegan thankful to be off the single lane road we'd taken from Armadale. From Broadford to Sligachan, the A87 is pinched by the Caolas Scalpay, a narrow body of water between Skye and the small island of Mullach Na Carn on the Northeast and by the towering Cuillin Hills on the Northwest. At Sligachan, the A87 heads due north while the A863, which we take, heads northwest. We pass the small mist enshrouded towns of Drynoch, Bracadale, Roskhill, Lonmore, and Kilmuir before finally reaching Dunvegan at the junction of the A853 and A850.

The A853 meanders alongside fast running water finding its way around and over the mountainous terrain of this heather encrusted isle. Along the drive we have seen water running off tall purple-green-sloped uninhabited mountains in abundance. The only people around us are those we pass on the highway. At stretches along the road we gaze in wonder at tall waterfalls rushing over the side of a cliff in the distance. Periodically during the drive, we have to give way to sheep crossing the roadway and on one occasion we slowed to watch and strained to hear a lone piper in his kilt serenading the mountains off the right side of the road and up a slight rise. Near the end of our two-hour drive a remarkable thing happens: the sun begins to break through the misty rain and there are stretches of road where no rain is falling. We take this as a good omen for our stay in Skye.

By the time we reach the hotel, the rain has passed and the sun is shining. The Dunvegan Hotel though not quite as old as the Stage House Inn has been around for some time. It sits on the side of a hill overlooking Loch Dunvegan. The hotel is one of the larger buildings in town, which consists of about a quarter-of-a-mile stretch of the A863 south of the hotel. There is a small shop selling groceries and dry goods, a post office and a few other shops. Just up the road toward the Castle sits a wooden Church on the far side of the road and a couple of homes on the near side.

Having arrived at the family home of the Clan McLeod, I was struck by the sense of connectedness I felt to the place. Here the name I bore was as common as “Smith” or “Jones”. And bearing the name made you feel part of this place, the descendent of a wandering castoff sent away on a voyage of discovery 200 years ago returning to his ancestor’s origin, like a migrating salmon. I was reminded of lines from “Death of the Hired Man,” the Robert Frost poem: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

June 18, 2005 – Dancing to the Rhythm of Life

June 18, 2005 – Dancing to the Rhythm of Life

This past week I drove a National Rental Car from San Jose to Anaheim for a trade show, which if it didn’t exist someone would have to have created it. This particular trade show has been on the verge of dying off since I first started going. The reason it hasn’t is because everyone who attends needs for it to exist. I’ve come to realize that every group needs a place where the members of that group can go and celebrate their membership. That’s what we all did last week. I went with a fist full of business cards and over the course of the three days I was there I traded most of them with folks I’ve known over the years but had fallen out of touch with for one reason or another.

We had all aged though we swore the other looked no different than the last time we saw one another. We were each at different stages in our life. Some were beginning families; some were starting over with a new significant other; some were shepherding the last of their children from home and off to college; some were on the verge of retiring; some had retired and decided to return because they couldn’t stomach the lack of stimulation; some had not shown up this year, the grim reaper’s harvest or following a different drummer down another path.

Over dinner tonight I relayed my experience in Anaheim to my wife IM, detailing who I had seen and what had become of them since we had last met. IM and I both realized that the secret of life is just how fleeting life really is—something you learn after watching your life race by and finally sensing its speed. As a child, you imagine life as an eternity with seemingly no end. About the time you have your first child and you see him/her enter school you then begin to see the speed at which life is actually traveling. You see it in the accelerating progress of year upon year from the first to the twelfth grade. The four years of college then zoom by and the next thing you know you’re by yourself watching your children begin the headlong rush you just experienced.

That’s what I saw at the conference. The vast majority of those I reconnected with were somewhere in that vortex of time being carried along pall mall without any way of altering the speed of their transit. And in the process, we all recall those fleeting moments telescoped back in time when we worked together in 2000, 1994, and 1986 or some other collection of years in the past. Now, at the end of this week another vanished fleeting moment when we spent an hour or two catching up over a lunch, a glass of wine in the evening, or an early morning breakfast. The one breakfast meeting I had was with a lovely woman I had last seen twenty years ago if not longer. Over pancakes and parfait, we each recalled others we knew in common and wondered what had become of them. Some had passed away, others had left the industry, and still others like us were still around doing much the same as we did a full score of years ago.

Like the constant rhythm of the sun’s rising and setting each day and the seasons’ arriving and departing, our lives have a similar repetitive rhythm; the other great insight time reveals in advancing years. Furthermore, the world around us follows the same recurring cadence: the vinyl record gives way to the compact disk; the 8-track tape gives way to the tape cassette; the VHS cassette gives way to the DVD; the television tube gives way to the flat screen TV; the almost-square low-quality TV gives way to the rectangular high-definition TV; the wired phone gives way to the wireless mobile phone. None of the functions has changed: recorded music, recorded motion pictures, long distance communications; even the computer is nothing more than an electronic calculator replacing paper and pencil with display screen and keyboard. We’re continually reinventing the same functions over and over again.

You would think that this revelation would engender despair, but in some way it’s comforting believing that by reinventing these functions over and over again, we are somehow perfecting them; that ultimately we may achieve some form of Nirvana, the perfect realization of excellence—much like the ballerina, who after years of devoted ritualistic practice finally achieves a flawless performance or the Zen master who achieves the perfect state of inner peace. It’s funny the insights you glean at a trade show.

June 12, 2005 – Getting Fired During Christmas ‘85

June 12, 2005 – Getting Fired During Christmas ‘85

The year 1985 was a bad year, at least the last quarter. I was still working for a publishing company based in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, then owned by a patriarch of an Irishman I’ll call Mul for short. The year before LA, the publisher of Design, had won a contest among several electronics trade magazine for having a record number of ad pages published in a given year. A couple of years earlier, I had begun working on a publication, called Systems & Software—I use its real name because it died only a few years after being formed. It was spun out of Design to cover products being developed for the emerging microcomputer market. SK was the editor—he was one of the Electronics editors that followed LA to Design. I was the executive editor based in California. We had another editor based in Boston. ST was the lady running the copy desk, a lovely young woman who had moved over from the copy desk at Design, In addition, we had two prolific freelancers WD and her husband HD, who had contests over who could write the greatest number of words each issue.

At the start of 1985, the high tech world was heading toward a downturn, which periodically visited the industry. LA had started S&S and was its publisher—the same group of sales people selling Design was also selling S&S. At the end of 1984 with record sales for Design under his belt, LA had been lured back to Manhattan to save Electronics, which had fallen on hard times and was loosing advertisers faster than it could replace them. SK had decided he wanted to return to Design and resume the managing editor role he had left to start S&S at LA’s request. An ex-Electronics editor, LC, with a track record as editor or a rival microcomputer publication was hired to edit the magazine. About five-foot seven in height with a trim build; he had a face that resembled Papa Smurf, a popular cartoon character of the time, especially because of his full white beard. Along with LC, Mul hired a new publisher RB, a sales executive from outside of publishing, to drive the business side of S&S—a good move as Design’s sales people always put S&S second to their main product. Tall, thin, handsome with a slow deliberate way of speaking he gave the impression of a man who knew what was causing the problem and how to fix it. I got to know RB during a sales meeting held at a hotel in Redondo Beach at the start of the year.

But all was to no avail. The market had turned and no amount of effort was going to offset the lack of dollars to support all the magazines clamoring for ad pages from cash strapped companies. Advertising budgets were the first expenditure cut in a downturn. No amount of additional incentive from our sales staff could change the reality of the business climate. The end came with the close of the year; I could sense its approach in my last trip to New Jersey in the fall of ’85. ST and her husband DT had invited me out to their place and I had accepted with the proviso that I buy them dinner. This was a time in my life when I had been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s work and the three of us spent the evening over dinner discussing his various novels. DT surprised me when he asked if I had read the novel Venus on a Half Shell by Kilgore Trout. I had assumed Kilgore Trout was a fictional character that ran through Kurt Vonnegut’s work. But, upon returning to their home DT presented me with a paperback copy of the work, which I read on the plane ride back to California.

As the meal came to an end, ST and I began to speculate on the fate of the magazine. She had already been preparing herself by pursuing her real estate license and was about to take her test. She was growing weary of editing and the publication’s slow decline was taking its toll on everyone in the office. It was similar to waiting for some terminally ill patient to breath his last breath. When she asked what I had in mind, I had no answer other than to begin freelancing. I had been freelancing on occasion while with the magazine. If an agency or company needed something written I would take on the assignment and charge them a fee of somewhere around at dollar per word. The assignments were relatively simple, writing company backgrounders included in press kits, knocking out a press release on a new product. I wrote a slick small book for a hard drive company through an ad agency. It paid a bit more but those projects were few and far between. The company printed several thousand copies. They were given away to customers but ended up being shipped to competitors throughout Japan and the rest of Asia. It was a hotly demanded little book among industry insiders. That was what I would do when the end came, I said.

However, instead of relying entirely on my network of contacts in California’s depressed high tech industry, I visited LA in Manhattan. He invited me over to his offices on Avenue of the Americas. By this time, LA and his wife KA had split. It was only a matter of time before the divorce would be final. In the meantime, he was with JA, a young MBA graduate Mul or LA had hired—I don’t recall which—to help market Design while LA was still running the shop. JA was a beautiful brunette and it was only a matter of time before the two had become a thing in the office. Now in his new office in a tall high-rise office building at the intersection of Avenue of the Americas and 48th Street, JA is standing beside him, her hand on his shoulder, his right arm around her waist as we discussed where we would have dinner that evening. In New York in the middle of the 1980s everyone wore suits with a designer label inside. I was attired in an Yves St Laurent two-piece dark blue suit and pale blue Pierre Cardin dress shirt and complementary tie all from Marshalls. The ensemble looked good enough that LA offered me a job as a salesman once I had settled into a chair in front of his desk. I think he was serious but I said that I wasn’t good at closing a sale, to which he seemed to agree.

There was another editor in our California office FM. He worked for Mul’s communications magazine. He had achieved his ambition of winning a Jesse M. Neal award for his writing. I forget which year. And afterwards with no more mountains to climb in editorial decided to give the sales job a try. LA took him on as his protégé and he did remarkable well. FM was a tall, handsome, athletic-looking young man with a winning smile, a quick wit, and a boyish face: the perfect man to be asking women advertising buyers for money. He was also talented. He would juggle balls with different magazines logos on them while making a sales presentation. He would drop the ball containing a competitor during the course of his talk to emphasize a major disadvantage the competitor had. He would end his talk with the one ball containing the Design logo, which he would present to his audience of one. It was the kind of innovative edge that he brought to the job.

As in editorial FM succeeded remarkably well, becoming rookie of the year among the Design sales force and winning the admiration and envy of his fellow sales people. But, somewhere FM’s life came undone. He had a girlfriend and was completely smitten with her. She was headstrong and free-spirited; the sort of being that couldn’t be tied down. She had gone into the Lifespring self-help program and FM had followed coming out with the kind of invigorated clarity of purpose that Lifespring was purported to give its followers. I suspect that was what helped FM direct all his energy into the job of selling and achieving his remarkable sales results. After winning rookie of the year, his girlfriend left for Japan and FM followed giving up his sales job. The two must have been living off the accumulated earnings he had amassed. The next I heard of FM was a year or two later. He had returned to California sometime earlier alone and lonely.

At dinner with LA that evening I mentioned that the end was near for S&S and asked LA if there were any chance to get some freelance work from Electronics. He said there was and to get back with him after his budget was approved next year. The end did come right before Christmas. The publisher, RB, had been fired along with the editor, LC. Mul had hired a tall big-framed guy with a John Wayne build, cowboy boots, and a paunch over his belt to run the day the day operations of the publishing company. His name was BL. An ex-Marine with a growl for a voice, he could be intimidating and arrogant, but he had been the force behind Mul’s successful personal computer magazine and nothing succeeds like success. Besides, PC magazines were all the rage and electronic trade magazines were falling out of favor. I had taken vacation and driven IM and our two daughters to El Paso to be with my parents and sisters over the holidays. The day after Christmas was a Thursday that year. It was the day I got a call at my parent’s home from SK, who had been assigned to deliver the bad news to me. He said I was off the payroll and they would send me a final check. In retrospect, it resembled the end of a “Godfather” movie with a sequence of well-orchestrated hits on rival gang members all filmed in slow motion. I hung up the phone and realized for the first time in my life I was on my own. I had been fired.

June 9, 2005 – Upstate New York Early ‘80s

June 9, 2005 – Upstate New York Early ‘80s

When I described LA, the man who rescued me from my ill-fitting gray flannel suit—he hired me from a PR firm I had been lured into by more money than I could have imagined—I neglected to mention that I felt a kinship toward him. He made the world a cool place to be no matter where we were. I suspect he had that same affect on others, especially women, who he delighted in charming. There were a lot of women to charm in the business we were in. Most media buyers at ad agencies were and probably still are women. It’s hard to describe in words his charm, but it was certainly there. Whenever he would ask me over to his place in the village, I always felt like I had entered a world I had always been excluded from. I suspect this resulted from my first journey to New York as a seven-year old child.

My father was being transferred to Puerto Rico and we traveled to New York in our fateful 1952 four-dour Oldsmobile. It was 1956 so the car was relatively new. My father and mother, my three younger sisters and me had driven from El Paso, Texas, stopping for a few days in Brooklyn, Mississippi, all the way to New York City to catch a military transport ship out of Brooklyn Naval Shipyard. The Oldsmobile would not be accompanying us but would catch a freighter departing later for the island. We arrived in Manhattan a couple of days before the ship was to depart but my father could not get accommodations the day we arrived at the guest house the Army maintained at the Navy Base for military families in transit. He was given a list of hotels in Manhattan where we could spend the night until accommodations became available the next day. There were three hotels on the list and my father tried each of them before realizing all were too expensive for our tight budget.

I recalled the sense of being excluded back then, unworthy to spend the night in a Manhattan Hotel with its doorman and polished brass framed revolving doors. We spent the night in the car on Staten Island, my first and last experience being homeless and living out of a car. It was made even more unpleasant by the fact that I had a painful toothache that would not give me peace. I can still remember the feeling of despair I felt all that night waiting for the sun to rise and for us to be moving in the car going to a place where I could unburden the pain I felt and be allowed to sleep in peace. As we drove about Manhattan, looking first for the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard then later trying to find the hotels the Army had recommended, I recalled seeing kids playing in school playgrounds and I wanted to join them, to be part of New York, the last place in the U.S. before our exile to Puerto Rico—for three years no less.

When I visited LA at his place, I felt a part of the city, not like the visitor who spends his time in hotels, though as a grown up with an expense account I could afford to spend nights in those hotels my family couldn’t have when I was a kid. When LA ran the publication, I would fly back three to four times a year and I would stay over a weekend either coming in or going out. With LA in charge, I was also able to live in Manhattan—I stayed at the St. Moritz on the Park, at the corner of Central Park South and 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas). It was then owned by the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley. I would find a parking place on the street somewhere close to the hotel rather than valet park the car. The commute was perfect. In the morning I would be driving to Jersey when the traffic was coming into the city and at night I’d be driving into Manhattan when everyone else was leaving. LA would occasionally invite me over to spend the day with him on Sunday. I recall him cooking a goose for dinner one time and I was quite surprised at how skillfully he prepared the meal—goose is a tough dish to prepare.

What I remember was the conversation, that seemed to go on, jumping from one topic to another—how Ed Koch was running the city, what was going on in Washington, what was happening in Europe, in Asia… And there was discussion of what was happening that day in Manhattan, new movies, new plays, new books,… It was intellectually stimulating to be hanging out with LA and his wife KA, who edited books freelance. I recall describing a book entitled. IN THE MODERN IDIOM, by Leo Hamalian and Arthur Zeiger both of the City College of the City University of New York, a collection of nonfiction, fiction, drama and poetry. I had found it in the “bargain books” section of Barnes and Noble, my favorite place in the bookstore. The book contained writings by the noted writers of the day, Germaine Greer, John Fowles, Donald Barthelme, Ted Hughes, Erica Jong, Gary Snyder… As I began to describe the book and its contents, KA smiled broadly and exclaimed that she had edited the book and found it one of the most rewarding assignments she had as an editor.

On another occasion, LA invited me to join him, KA and the kids at their farm in upstate New York. I had planned to meet some acquaintances from the UK who had just moved to Manhattan, but they stood me up and I accepted LA’s offer. It was the fall of which year I can’t remember. It took us a long while to complete the drive up to the farm and I recall wondering if we’d get there before midnight—we did. The place was cold and LA lit a fire in the huge fireplace and we had a bite to eat before turning in for the night. I recall falling right off to sleep and waking the next morning to the sound of LA making coffee in the kitchen. When the coffee was on, we drove down to the small market in the town nearby and shopped for breakfast and dinner that evening. We returned to the farm, which was now fully awake.
The farm had a barn in the back. Both were in need of a paint job as well as general repairs. The main house was close to the two-lane black top that ran to the small town, the name of which escapes me.

After breakfast, we took a drive to the top of a hill frequented by hang gliders and we watched as they leapt into the air and sailed to the valley below. The one piece of drama that afternoon was a young woman who could not seem to get off. Finally, one of the guys behind her called her by her first name and asked if she was okay. She turned to him and asked him to go ahead of her, which he did. Once he had gotten airborne, she took her position at the point where he had leapt and with only a moment’s hesitation took flight, to general applause from the spectators. We also spent some of the afternoon hiking about the hilltop. Everyone seemed to be unfazed by the exertion, something I remarked upon only to be reminded that in Manhattan people walk everywhere and at a fast pace least you be run over by those around you.

We returned to the farmhouse and had dinner. Afterwards the neighbors down the road came by for a visit. We were drinking wine and KA and LA were sharing a joint. I can’t recall if the neighbors partook of the joint but they did have some wine. KA did offer me a hit on the joint but I declined saying I was afraid that if I inhaled the smoke I would be tempted to start smoking again. I had given up a pack-a-day habit cold turkey over 12 years before, but I still had dreams of lighting up a cigarette and picking up the habit again. Each time I would awake with a great sense of guilt for having started again—I am nothing if not guilt-ridden.

The following day was a lazy Sunday reading the New York Times, which we purchased at the shop along with breakfast fixings. LA and I wandered about the farm talking. He had become introspective and began recounting his plans for retirement. He would move up to the farm to cut his living expenses and live modestly. Somehow, I couldn’t picture a man of excessive appetites settling for a modest living in upstate New York. LA was somewhere in his fifties back then and had a good decade before retirement age. I suspect the pressure of having to produce continually increasing revenue results was beginning to take its toll on him. I suspect, too, that the pressure was one of the reasons for his hedonist appetite, something to diffuse the continuously building pressure. I started the drive back to the city sometime in late afternoon. I wanted to be back at a reasonable hour. All in all it was a relaxing weekend, one in which I felt a part of LA’s private life.

June 7, 2005 – Accounting for a Man’s Indulgences

June 7, 2005 – Accounting for a Man’s Indulgences

When I wrote of LA in my last entry I described a guy who had begun to indulge his hedonist appetites and to share with those around him especially the advertising buyers. Tickets to a football game at Candlestick Park in a corporate box LA rented or otherwise secured for the event. Dinners at the best restaurants in San Francisco, Dallas, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or other big cities where there were buyers to be swayed away from the competition and over to Design. And always there were the mind stimulants inhaled or swallowed that made those entertained, even more amenable to doing business with us, versus them. LA did not have a monopoly on the practice but the other guys didn’t get to hang out with LA.

When I first met LA while I was still working at the advertising and public relations firm on Waverley Street in Palo Alto and LA was still an editor at Electronics, it was in the company of GS, the writer for the agency. GS seldom got up from his Underwood typewriter to greet agency visitors except when it was an editor he had worked with in the past. GS was Electronics alumni, recruited into the agency for what reason, I will never know. Something must have happened at the magazine that made him want to leave the almost academic world of publishing for the razzle-dazzle, BS-laden world of PR. When LA would come into the office, GS would stop his pecking away at the keys and the two of them would spend time talking. I would learn later that GS was LA’s source of cannabis when in the valley. GS did not indulged but a relative did and GS would be the intermediary.

GS and I had that in common at least, neither of us liked to indulge in banned substances, though he had a taste for beer while I was developing a palate for wine, not a particularly discerning one that could distinguish year and vintner, but rather one that could decide if the bottle was suitable to serve clients or guests. It is the one gift the agency bestowed that I continue to appreciate. I suspect LA recognized in me the square I was when we first met: someone who largely played by the rules and never pushed the envelope of self-indulgence. I have a Catholic upbringing in a military household to thank for that. Never mind, I eventually did emulate LA and paid the price for doing so. Uptight, inhibited guys like me should never attempt to be what they are not, but that’s another story.

When LA became publisher of Design, his sales manager, BL was the man he relied on to drive the sales staff to meet the magazine’s aggressive sales goals. I saw the two of them in action a couple of times as I sat in on dinners following a sales meeting. Once at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel near LAX—the one where the FBI busted John DeLorean on October 19, 1982 for drug trafficking—I joined a dinner. (LA asked me what I wanted to drink. I replied, “a glass of Champagne.” He ordered a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Brut Fleur de Champagne, which he shared with me.) BL was drinking club soda. As I got carried away with my glass of expensive champagne, I watched LA and BL get up and walk just out of earshot of the assembled table of salesmen that were busily drinking and talking among themselves. When the two returned LA took his seat and BL stood before the assembled throng of sales people and with his booming voice lauded the performers individually, recounting solo performances by mentioning particular thorny obstacles overcome in the process. His impromptu speech interrupted by spontaneous outbursts of applause. LA whispered to me that BL was setting the stage for the tough task of setting next year’s sales goals for each of the sales staff. That would happen in the days following the meeting. BL was the man with the carrot and the stick, administered at LA’s discretion. God, I was glad I didn’t work in sales.

BL returned his carrot and stick to LA and retired. Gone was the older man, father figure that I suspect LA had come to appreciate. LA’s real father, still alive and living in retirement with a woman considerably his junior had not shared the professional intimacy that LA and BL had shared. There is something about making money together that builds bonds. In a way, the process is no different than scaling a mountain as twosome. Each has to rely on the other to make the right decisions about each upward advance against the objective. Push too hard or make a mistake and you fall back loosing ground against your objective. But when the chemistry works and the twosome manage to each accomplish the objective they collectively set, there has to be a sense of mutually shared satisfaction that brings the individuals closer together.

The vacuum left by BL’s departure was filled by PM, not much taller than my five foot seven, but with a big frame and a round girth—the result of an Italian love of mangia. While BL had been the voice of moderation and restraint for LA’s self-indulgent hedonism, PM quickly became the voice of excess and no restraint. PM lived as though there was no tomorrow and everything had to be enjoyed this instant. One Christmas, PM invited the entire West Coast sales and editorial staff, about nine of us, to lunch—our annual Christmas party. Lunch was at the Velvet Turtle Restaurant on South Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale near the intersection with Fremont Avenue. It was across Mary from our office, which was on the second floor of a bank building. The lunch began just after noon and was over just before two. Bottles of wine opened before and during the meal, with PM toasting everyone at the table for something. Most of the editorial and administrative staff left shortly after dessert and coffee. The sales staff and PM as well as a couple of guests who joined the meal sometime after we got started, two customers from different companies who PM invited, remained at the table about to order after dinner brandy. The restaurant was empty except for PM and his remaining party. I would learn later that the lunch flowed into dinner and on into the night. PM did not show up for work the following day returning the day after complaining of a terrible hangover. There was a 12-hour period where no one including PM knew where he was.

One of the side effects of PM’s indulgent lifestyle, which besides food and drink also included smoking, was deteriorating health. He had severe neck pain, which had been treated with surgery to no avail. A regimen of drugs that kept the pain bearable, combined with his excess weight, alcohol, and tobacco was a recipe for disaster. PM was not a man to exercise either. I followed the magazine’s Japanese sales representative HM around Tokyo for several days as we visited companies. We rode trains and walked to nearly every appointment. In shape as I was, I had to walk at a faster than normal pace to keep up with HM as we left trains and made our way through the maze of streets in various parts of the city. HM would describe the same visit when he was escorting PM to these same destinations. PM would complain of having to walk any distance shorter than from the street to the lobby of the office they were visiting. When they disembarked the train, if the office they were visiting was more than few blocks from the station, they would take cabs. And when they did walk HM was always getting well ahead of PM and having to wait for him to catch up.

As time went on the neck pain became so unbearable that PM went in for more surgery that one moderately reduced his suffering. Now with neck brace on and a stern warning from his doctor that he was going to kill himself if he did not start exercising, lose some weight, quit smoking, and stop drinking. To his credit, PM made a valiant effort to do all four with modest success with the latter two and little or no success with the first two. PM had this Mercedes 300 four-door sedan that he loved. It had become his legs as he drove it everywhere he went. He had moved back to New Jersey at the request of the latest owners of Design magazine. One day just after the start of the last decade of the old millennium, PM parked his Mercedes on the street in front of his house, got out and began walking to the front door. Halfway up the walkway to his house, he collapsed on the ground suffering a heart attack. He was found laying face down on his front lawn several hours later.

June 5, 2005 – Making up Lost Time

June 5, 2005 – Making up Lost Time

I mentioned LA in my previous entry and stated that he was a Greenwich Village Bohemian. After closing his bar in the village and getting a nine-to-five job at Electronics magazine, he converted to capitalism with a vengeance, as if he were trying to make up for lost time—he was in his forties then, ten years ahead of me in chronological age, ten years behind his peers in attaining material wealth and position in the world. I suspect that was what drove him once he joined the world of big business and saw the proliferation of wealth being generated in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley. There was a gold rush going on and he had missed it as he contemplated the meaning of life. The time for reflection and contemplation was over. It was time to make some money, a name for himself, and enjoy the spoils of commercial power in that order before he had to retire.

When LA took the chief editor position at Design magazine in New Jersey, he began to recruit editors from Electronics magazine. SK followed him over as did LM, a wonderful Italian woman, an engineer—the one (if not only) woman editor at Electronics back then. Another technical editor at Electronics, MR also came over as did others over time, but this was the core group. SK and LM became managing editors and MR became one of the technology editors at Design. With this group from Electronics, familiar with his working style and what he was trying to accomplished, LA could leave the business of producing competent, credible editorial to an experienced staff and he could go off and begin to wrench market share from the magazine that had brought him into the business and created the reputation that enabled him to snatch the top editorial position at Design. After all, it would take forever to move up the ranks at Electronic to the top position—too many others with more seniority standing in his way.

But the top spot in editorial was not the position LA was after. That would make his reputation. What he wanted was to be the publisher of Design. That’s where the money was. That’s where he could enjoy the spoils of power. Moreover, while an editor he had observed the publishers of both Electronics and Design. His observations told him that neither was terribly competent: neither understood the technology that was covered in the publications they managed and neither understood how to use that editorial to garner increased advertising dollars. It would only be a matter of time before he would usurp the publisher of Design. One bad year and the old boy would be gone.

An Irishman I’ll call Mul owned the publishing company that produced Design when LA joined. Besides Design, Mul owned two other magazines; both published monthly, one covering radio communications and the other personal computers. Both were prospering: the former supported by the military aerospace industry and the latter funded by the proliferating number of new companies entering the personal computer market—one sales lady BG who started as a lowly telemarketer, became, within a matter of months, the top sales person inside of Mul’s company all by finding the next new start-up, getting their business, and servicing them as they grew and placed even bigger orders. I mention the personal computer publication because LA overlooked the great growth potential of this emerging market segment, opting to stay with Design, then considered Mul’s cash cow, rather than attempting to either expand Design to catch the PC wave or create a spin out publication that would do so—forgive the Monday morning quarterbacking.

LA’s patience paid off. Within a year of joining Design, the old publisher resigned or was fired and Mul promoted LA to the position, in the process, boosting his salary considerably and creating a lucrative incentive program based on expanding the magazine advertising pages. His departure left a hole in the editor position that offered LA his first tough decision: picking his replacement. Wisely he chose LM, thus making her the first woman editor of any publication at the time. It was inspired for a number of reasons. One was that most media buyers were women and Design’s sales force could use her gender as yet another reason to consider Design—a progressive publication, in tune with the time—over its rivals. A second was she was the best qualified among all those LA brought over from Electronics. She understood the realities of publishing—advertising paid the cost of editorial, while knowing the propriety of publishing content that provided value to the reader rather than serving the interest of advertisers. Knowing how much to grant the latter while preserving the value to the former, took someone who understood the unspoken rules of trade publishing. LA knew LM understood the game and could be counted on to aid the sales process not impede it as the editors at Electronics were inclined to do.

LA had no experience driving a sales force but he knew how to position and market the magazine to advertisers. What he needed was a right hand man who had such experience and was willing to use him as his Sancho Panza. He found it in BL, a consummate salesman who had a record of success that went back over three decades if not longer. BL had no heart for the top job and he had an aversion for Mul. He was a man looking to sell his highly appreciated home in Los Alto, California and retire to Pacific Grove in the outskirts of Monterey. However, before his last bow he wanted to top off his next egg and LA was the means to that end. Tall and willowy, for such a big man—slightly over six foot with long legs a long distance runner would envy, BL was the sort of person who easily ingratiated himself with acquaintances as well as strangers he met. With those he knew he was a very physical man, a firm handshake with the right hand, while the left hand clasped the shoulder or elbow of the one he was greeting. He knew who would welcome such physical contact and who wouldn’t and he never got the two confused. Once beyond the greeting BL immediately took his cohort into his confidence looking into their eyes and telling them something he was sure they would want to hear, a new joke, a juicy piece of gossip about someone of interest to the person, news of a competitor or rival. BL knew each of his prospects likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses, and very often their darkest secrets—who was sleeping with who, who had a drug problem, who was having marital problems… information indispensable to successfully closing a piece of business. He had a deep voice that self-assuredly boomed when he spoke, but could be moderated to a whisper for conveying a message intended only for the listener.

LA lacked this wealth of knowledge about the various buyers and relied heavily on BL. However, LA was no novice in the ways of influencing others. He had many of the same attributes. He would use physical contact as a way of building bonds. In nearly every meeting I attended with LA, he would at some point lay a hand on the shoulder of someone—man or woman—seated or standing in the meeting. The gesture had no other significance than the display of familiarity between LA and whomever he was touching. Like BL, he knew who among those around him welcomed the touch and those who would have been repelled by it.

In stature, LA was a bit shorter, perhaps half a foot shorter, than BL. The two of them, heads together in conversation, for all the world looked like father and son. The gray-haired older man talking earnestly to the younger LA, always showing the deference of employee to boss, though LA would never had demanded such a display—he was a New York liberal who eschewed all such trapping of power. When I first met LA he had the beginnings of a paunch that comes with middle age. When he spoke he would absent-mindedly run his hands through his salt and pepper dark hair, always worn longer than anyone on Wall Street would deem appropriate, but his bohemian friends would view it as conservative. He had a stutter; though I never got the sense of tension one usually gets when listening to someone speak with a stutter. When a stutter was about to affect a word he was about to utter, he would will himself to suppress it and complete the word a moment or two later as if he had deliberately paused for effect. Over time, the stutter nearly went away; certainly the number of times it occurred during public speaking lessened.

LA had a hedonistic appetite for life and he indulged it entertaining customers. One of BL’s biggest challenges was to keep LA’s appetite in check so that it never became apparent to Mul, a feat he accomplished with finesse. A recovering alcoholic BL shunned all alcohol and drugs and managed to overcome the constant temptations around him, that could have caused him to backslide. He won my undying admiration for his strength of character. Their partnership would end two years after it had begun. BL had reached his retirement age and in the process had help LA exceed his sales goals each year. He could hang up his salesman’s suit and head off into a succession of fog-obscured sunsets in Pacific Grove and interrupted by days of golf and volunteer docent duty at the Monterey Aquarium. LA would find BL’s equal shortly afterwards in another man who rightfully fit the label of Sancho Panza.

June 3, 2005 – Hanging out with “A Mover & A Shaker”

June 3, 2005 – Hanging out with “A Mover & A Shaker”

I first met LA shortly after I joined the Advertising and Public Relations Company in Palo Alto in the fall of 1977. He was the semiconductor editor with Electronics Magazine, which was then owned by New York-based McGraw Hill. He arrived at the magazine through a roundabout route. He owned a bar somewhere in Greenwich Village, living the bohemian life, with a new wife. When not tending bar, he submitted pieces to literary publications in the Village. A few were picked up. He said he sold the bar when he realized he didn’t want to watch his regulars slowly kill themselves. When he went looking for a real job, he applied to Electronics and got called in for an interview, shortly afterwards.

One of the editors he interviewed with was a guy named SK, a brooding hulk of a man, who seemed at once to be the epitome of quiet calm and at the same time always on edge. His handsome Eastern European face would occasionally brighten momentarily into a smile. He was soft spoken, almost a whisper, except when angered; then his voice would boom. SK was a man of few words and I found myself talking constantly when I was around him, our exchanges interspersed with an infrequent short sentence or a smile from him. When SK interviewed LA for the opening at Electronics and saw LA’s resume, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a small literary publication containing an article by LA. He asked if LA was the author and LA said yes. SK smiled and the interview was over. The oddity was that two guys in a technical magazine were linked by a literary publication that probably already had ceased publishing. I mention SK because he would become one of LA’s right hand men.

Though LA lacked extensive writing experience, he had a Physics degree—I forget from where—and he had incredible charm. He made you feel as though you and he were “simpatico,” kindred spirits that knew how the world worked. He turned that charm on me during our first meeting. I would have done anything to help him and I probably did, giving him access to any of the executives of my largest client, the Silicon Valley semiconductor giant, providing him first choice of any of the newest products coming out of my clients. It was a solid PR decision because back then he wrote for the premier technical magazine in the industry. A high tech company would have given anything to be featured in the publication. Its paid circulation included the heads of all the up and coming high tech companies of the 1970s. Its readers also included Wall Street analysts and general media and newspaper journalists wanting to keep up on the latest developments in the emerging computer industry.

The president of the PR firm had a simple strategy when it came to generating a buzz about his clients. Get an article in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Electronics and the rest of the media will come asking for follow-on stories. LA was the man to get at Electronics to affect this strategy. In the late 1970s, there was a separation between advertising and editorial—the line these days have become a bit blurred, especially in trade magazines. PR account executives and market managers or VPs would plead for appointments with editors at Electronics. And trying to get the editor to do a large piece on some product or business alliance your client was doing was like pulling teeth with nearly every editor at Electronics except LA. With him, he would give you what you wanted but would extract a favor at some later date.

Writing was not a solitary endeavor for LA, more a collaboration. His stories were not so much written as spoken. He would walk about talking while an associate would write down what he said. Once they had his brain dump on paper, the two would work out the structure and the flow. When the piece was in good enough shape, it would get put into the editorial process at Electronics, which meant nearly every sentence would be evaluated, rearranged, replaced, or reworded. One articles editor at the publication was notorious for working into the night—a common practice among articles editors—on a piece that would be returned to the writer with comments—chastisements for bad logic or sloppy construction—and lots of questions to clarify facts, assertions, or speculations by either the writer or someone quoted in the piece. LA knew that whatever he turned in would be made readable, understandable, and accurate. When I later went to work for LA—he hired me on more than one occasion—I realized that he had no great passion for the subject matter about which he wrote. It was more a means to an end.

A milestone on the way to that end occurred sometime in early 1978. I had been working at the agency since the fall of 1977. LA had been wooed away from Electronics to join its arch rival, I’ll call it Design for short, across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Design is still being published today. When LA took the editorial helm at Design, his goal was to unseat Electronics as the premier magazine in the high tech world. However, the high tech world was going through a major change. In addition to the handful of older publications that were serving readers in this community, there was a proliferation of new magazines being formed: Byte, Interface Age, and Personal Computing among 100s of others. The first three I mentioned have long since ceased publication.

These magazines were less interested in what technical widgets went into building a computer—though later on they became more interested—and far more interested in what the computer could do. The thousands of companies being formed to supply product for the home computer market were supporting these publications. Many computers labeled home computer were evolving into microcomputers that competed with expensive minicomputers being sold to medium and to small size businesses. Microcomputer had a price tag under $10,000 while minicomputers were selling for ten times that price. The number of widget makers—the advertisers Electronics and its five to eight rivals, were competing to woo—was growing at a far slower rate. For nearly 60 years, Electronics had managed to stay relevant to each new generation of electronic technology coming into the market. Now, its position as the premier publication was being challenged not only by its rivals, but by the onslaught of new magazines with entirely different editorial charters. The latter would eventually wreck havoc on all the older established publications—eventually contributing to the death of Electronics.

LA’s strategy at Design was simple, attack Electronics where they were vulnerable. A major vulnerability was their unwillingness to bargain for editorial coverage. And the most coveted editorial coverage a company could hope to receive was the cover story in an issue of the publication. Electronics was known for running covers on new technology and new products, but they would turn down many requests before one came along they felt deserved a cover. Though it was never explicitly stated, LA’s strategy was that major advertisers, making a cover request, should be given consideration. It was a successful strategy and it began to bear fruit almost as soon as LA joined Design and started driving its editorial direction.

LA hired me in the spring of 1980 and he introduced me to East Coast publishing and to his bohemian world. He and his family had a loft on Bethune Street. To access the loft, meant riding up two floors, in an aging elevator . I can’t remember the light in the elevator ever working. He also had a small farm in upstate New York that I visited at least once. I really liked LA and enjoyed hanging out with him. And I miss not having him around. I’ll tell you more about him in another entry.

June 2, 2005 – The Gray Flannel Suit Didn’t Fit

June 2, 2005 – The Gray Flannel Suit Didn’t Fit

I’ve mentioned in the past that I did a little over a year in the PR department of an advertising and public relations firm. The company was located at 348 Waverley Street in Palo Alto, California. The agency was housed in a flat roof—Frank Lloyd Wright imitation—office building at the northwest corner of Waverley and Lytton Avenue. It’s been demolished and a much larger office complex built in its place. The original building was a single story structure with an entrance on Waverley. From the sidewalk you entered a square courtyard, which the building surrounded. To the right as you entered was the advertising agency with the artists and designers occupying the entire wing of the building. Ad agency account executives and accounting occupied the section of the building directly across from the entrance. The office of the President and CEO with the company’s large conference room took up the left corner of the structure farthest from the entrance. The remainder of the left side of the office complex was where the PR department was located. Finally, the part of the building immediately to the left of the entrance had a separate entrance on Waverley. It housed a small agency subsidiary that did collateral materials—brochures, signs, logos, and other graphics a client might need that wasn’t produced as part of a print ad.

I was brought into the agency by an older PR guy, named BB, who had just been hired from a Dallas-based semiconductor company. His charter was to bring new account executives on board as the agency was in the midst of a growth spurt. There were three of us who joined about the same time. One was an Indian fellow named NK, who had worked for a large PR agency back east—I want to say Cleveland. The second fellow was an immaculately dressed, good-looking young man, RW who had come from an agency in Orange County. He drove a nice car—an older Mercedes Diesel I seem to recall. I was the nerd from a trade magazine with only nine months of experience being an editor, who drove a 1974 stripped down Toyota Corolla. What I had going for me was I understood all the technology. I could perform the account executive function: meet with the client, produce a PR plan for a product rollout, execute the plan, and even write the release and background material. On really major product announcements the president had an ex-editor, GS, with years of writing experience. His only job was to hack copy. He sat at a manual typewriter—an old Underwood, I seem to remember—for hours on end and cranked out copy. It was great copy, too, that told a compelling story. Magazines could easily have printed his work unedited but most of them edited it to put their scent on the piece. There was an office manager GL, a wonderful black-haired older Italian beauty who managed all the overlooked details.

The agency was a work in progress when I started, which is what attracted me to the place in the first place. There were very few formal procedures for handling PR. I learned as I went, largely by reacting to requests from the clients in the beginning. I had been given the agency’s large semiconductor company as well as the now famous home computer start-up to handle. A 6 by 9 1/2 –in 150-sheet college notebook from my time at the agency contains all of my meeting notes beginning February 14, 1978. The pages are written in ink and contain the names of the product manager and others attending the meeting, technical details discussed along with diagrams in some cases, as well as the strategy for announcing the product. Most of my notes from meetings with my largest client contained all the information I would need to construct a press release as well as create a rollout plan for the product. Some entries were remarks jotted in haste.

For example, on February 15, 1978, I have notes from a meeting with AM, the CEO of the home computer start-up. The scribbling shows the names of venture capitalists, who had just invested collectively a million