July 31, 2005 – Pondering The Freeways of Los Angeles

July 31, 2005 – Pondering The Freeways of Los Angeles

The freeways of LA are unique from those anywhere else, perhaps because they defined the term “freeway.” When I hear the term, I reflexively think of LA. These major arteries supply life to this city that unlike Manhattan, Boston, or even San Francisco appears to be without a heart. But, there is a Los Angeles, of course. The small village of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porciuncula River) was founded September 4, 1781. And it’s the closest thing there is to a heart this sprawling urban-suburban megaplex will ever possess. Viewed from a map, the original Pueblo appears imprisoned within a diamond-shaped cell by three major freeways—in the heart-artery metaphor, LA appears to have an aorta and a pulmonary artery. California Highway 101 and Interstate 110 form an X at the northern tip of the diamond (the aorta). The 110 crossing I-10 form the western tip moving counterclockwise (the pulmonary artery). The southern tip is located just before I-10 crosses South Alameda Street. The eastern tip is where the 101 and I-10 run parallel a short distance before splitting up and going their separate ways.

These freeways in addition to Interstate 5 and California Highway 60 all converge on the 12-square miles surrounding the small Pueblo. If you’ve ever been near downtown LA on any of these seven freeways during the morning or evening commute, you know how fast LA’s blood flows. And as with the heart, all the main arteries do pass through LA, but just as the heart creates auxiliary flows, there are several bypasses and ancillary arteries that snake around to escape the bottleneck of the small village that often threatens to shut down circulation all together—curiously the French call traffic “la circulation.”

This whole complex transportation system began in 1897. At his shop on Fifth Street, S.D. Sturgis built the first automobile in Southern California for J. Philip Erie. By 1904, 1,600 automobiles were driving the streets along with horse drawn carriages. The maximum speed in residential areas was 8 miles per hour but you had to drive slower, 6 MPH, in business districts. A hundred years later, each day over 10 million people collectively drive nearly 100 million miles on the freeways within the approximate 6000 square miles of greater Los Angeles. When an LA freeway is moving at 60 miles an hour, it will transport 2000 cars per hour per lane. Inside these millions of cars traveling LA freeways daily are a cross-section of humankind, all rushing at over 60 MPH where and when possible: cops and robbers, movie stars and wanabees, dope addicts and dealers, soccer moms and trophy wives, gang bangers and nerds, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, rich people and poor people… all of them going some where to do some thing. Cars and freeways are all about wish fulfillment. Whatever you want is a drive away: a Laker’s game, dinner at Spago’s, the interview that will change your life... Most of them will arrive late, because every one of these drivers in search of what ever is not exempt from the backup. (The only exceptions are those drivers with passengers zooming by in the carpool lanes as four or five lanes creep along stop and go.) Sitting in that backup are hundreds of thousands of “if only's…” and “I wish's…”

The drivers in these cars are a heterogeneous mix of age and experience from the senior citizen to the high school student who just passed his driver’s test: the former who remembers when many of LA’s freeways were new and the latter who only knows today’s worn, asphalt-patched concrete thoroughfares. I’m closer to the former, who has lived through and taken for granted the growth of LA’s highway system. I’ve driven them as a young man in search of information: the currency that I collected during my travels. I’ve been both an “if only” and “I wish.” Companies I visited in my travels included Dataproducts in Woodland Hills, Alpha Data in Chatsworth, Kennedy in Altadena, MDB Systems in Orange, Wangco and Pertec in Los Angeles, General Automation in Anaheim, and the list goes on. All of them were making computers and peripherals long since made obsolete. Most all were “if only's.” Back then I often thought, “I wish” I’d been part of their success only to watch them fade away. Displace workers moved on to form or work at companies that supplanted their previous ones. Companies like people age. Those with good genes live longer.

I moved on as well realizing how futile were the many times I said, “I wish” and “if only.” Funny how all these changes occur and the traffic on the freeway continues to zoom by completely unaware of the little dramas going on continuously along its many miles. The observer, like me, sees some of these dramas and for a moment in time records them but then moves on as well. Life, like freeway traffic, continues on day after day. Even the Northridge Earthquake on January 17, 1994 that collapsed I-10 at La Cienega Boulevard only stopped the flow of traffic for a small section of the entire system. The traffic continued to move as Angelinos found ways around the break in their continuous daily journey to and from where ever it is they go. Like a never ending sojourn it goes on and the freeways enable it to do so.

July 28, 2005 – City by the Bay

July 28, 2005 – City by the Bay

A warm summer day in San Francisco, August, 8, 1963—meaning temperatures in the mid-70s (Fahrenheit)—I’ve collected my 21- by 36-inch top load olive drab Navy duffel bag, with hand grip, shoulder strap, and lockable metal loop. Coming from boot camp in San Diego, the temperature difference was inconsequential. What was of great consequence was the freedom after being confined to a barbed wire enclosed training facility for over two months. The freedom was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. It was terrifying because for the past 17 years, I’ve been told what to do and when to do it, the last 12 weeks in recruit training have been especially so as nearly every waking moment was filled with duties to perform. Even the weekends were spent preparing for the week ahead: doing laundry, mending clothing, shining shoes, and writing letters home. Meals were served at specific times during the day. There was a prescribed time when lights were turned out and you were expected to be in your bunks. And you were awakened at exactly the same time every morning to begin your day.

Now, as I left the airport in my dress blue uniform—pullover jumper, spotless white navy cap, 13-button, trousers—with spit-shined shoes, I had to decide whether to take a cab or the bus into the city. Where there had been clear guidelines about what to do right up until I boarded the bus to the airport from boot camp earlier in the morning, I was now on my own. I took a cab. After being cooped up with a barracks full of sailors living asshole to belly button for the past nine weeks I wanted some space between me and other humans. I told the cab driver to take me to the Marines Memorial Hotel at the corner of Mason and Sutter in the City. I had until Monday to report for duty on Treasure Island. Here I was in the city I had dreamed about coming to as a teenager. My senior year in high school living with my parents at Ft Lewis, Washington, I would listen to radio broadcasts from San Francisco as I lay in bed dreaming of the day I would walk the hills of the city. One of the late night broadcasts was from a nightclub in the city—I want to say the Hungry i, but I can’t remember for sure. I can recall wondering what it would be like to be in the audience, sipping a drink—back then I would have ordered a scotch and soda because I had heard the Kingston Trio sing the song of the same name and I became hooked on the music and the drink. My experience with alcohol was limited to screw top wine and Olympia Beer, though I had aspirations to more sophisticated adult drinks—the power of ads in Playboy were apparent in me.

Established in 1948 in a building that was rose in 1926, the Marines Memorial Hotel bearing an early 20th century motif, which back then was no big deal. It’s a fine hotel in a city of great hotels. The non-profit Marines' Memorial Association built the hotel as a memorial to the Marines who lost their lives in the Pacific during the Second World War. I was told by a sailor I had struck up a conversation with at the airport in San Diego that members of the military were welcome. Paying the cabby, I walked in without a reservation and asked the desk clerk if he had a room for the night and luckily he had. Also, there was a special rate for active duty servicemen, which would still take a good chunk of the over-two-months pay I had amassed during boot camp but I had nothing else to spend my money on—certainly not scotch and soda since I was still under the drinking age in California. Furthermore, one of my dreams was coming true. I was checked into a nice hotel on a hill in San Francisco: the lyrics of the Tony Bennett hit recorded the year before stuck in my head: “to be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars…”

After unpacking my bag, putting all my belongings neatly into the dresser and closet of my hotel room and stowing my folded duffel bag away—boot camp training—I set out to explore the city by the bay. Mason runs parallel to and is a block west of Powell so I struck out on foot heading east to Powell then turning left and started climbing Powell to Nob Hill. In the middle of Powell, a succession of cable cars crowded with tourist with no stomach for the ascent on foot watched my slow labored progress. I eventually arrived at the crest “above the blue and windy sea” and wandered through the Mark Hopkins and Fairmont Hotels. This was a life that I wanted to live, to be a well dressed civilian with the wherewithal to travel the world frequenting places like this as I went about doing whatever it was I was going to do when I grew up. A while later after taking the elevator to the top of both hotels and wandering the cavernous baroque lobby of the Fairmont and the more intimate one of the Mark Hopkins, I followed the cable car tracks down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

The Wharf in 1963 comprised the restaurants along Jefferson Street between Taylor and Jones Street: A. Sabella, Castagnola's, Alioto's, and Fisherman's Grotto, as well as the curio shops selling San Francisco souvenirs. The steel-hull, square-rigger Balclutha was birth at the Pier 41 across Embarcadero from Powell Street. She was named for a town in New Zealand. I had to go aboard and wander about a ship where I was the one person properly dressed. It was the first ship I had been on that was in water since I joined the Navy. All the drills we performed during boot camp were done in parts of ships that were planted firmly on the ground. You could feel the deck of the Balclutha move under foot. It felt good and I thought how great it would be to be underway aboard ship somewhere beyond the Golden Gate. I would know this sensation but it would take over a year and a half for me to experience it. Toward evening, I walked south on Stockton Street to Columbus Street, southeast on Columbus into Chinatown on Grant Avenue where I wandered the crowded streets walking in and out of shops teaming with people. I returned to Powell from Grant on Broadway Street—the neon signs were on but the Sun hadn’t set and the place looked like a aging tart without her make-up. South on Powell until I reached Tad Steakhouse—a great steak and fries at a price a sailor could afford. After dinner I walked back up Powell to Broadway. I had to see the street all lit up. The Condor and other joints along Broadway had their hawkers outside their entrances doing everything to entice those passing by into their club short of physically grabbing you. I had to answer to everyone of them as I walk the length of the street from Columbus Avenue to Sansome Street. Carol Doda had yet to arrive though she would make her debut at the Condor before I left the city

I was blithely living my “scotch and soda” dream in my “city by the bay.” The one thing lacking was someone to enjoy it with. I would have to travel to the other end of the country to find her and spend another 10 years getting both of us back here. But we did make it and it has made all the difference.

July 25, 2005 – An Interrupted Journey

July 25, 2005 – An Interrupted Journey

Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the Manhattan World Trade Center attack on September 11th 2001 was fast becoming a shadow of its former self. The first signs of change I recalled was the traffic. Freeways that were once clogged during morning and evening rush hours had begun to move at a faster average speed. It took you less time to go from South San Jose to San Francisco on either California 101 or Interstate 280. The next thing I noticed was the number of office buildings sprouting “For Lease” signs. These harbingers began to appear six to nine months after the attack. You can view economic recessions like you view the weather, with your economist of choice being your favorite weatherperson. For those who were still employed the grim economic statistics recited each night on KRON, KPIX, KNTV, or KGO were like listening to details of gale force winds uprooting trees and leveling poorly constructed buildings in another neighborhood. Those who were in the affected area were busy righting themselves, wishing they lived in an unaffected neighborhood.

That was me a couple of months after the attack, a felled tree in the aftermath of an economic storm. I knew I was in for the uprooting and felt reasonably certain my fate would befall the small company that let me go. The small enterprise where I was employed was located in a high rise across Guadalupe Parkway (California Highway 87) from the then San Jose International Airport. It acquired its current handle “The Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport in November 2001, when the city wanting to honor Mineta—the 59th Mayor of San Jose’s and its 15th Congressional District Representative to Congress for twenty years from 1975 to 1995 renamed it. George W. Bush had appointed Mineta to head the U.S. Department of Transportation in January 2001—San Jose’s native son wielding power in Washington. From the multi-story parking garage of my office complex, during lunch hour I would watch the intense airport construction going on across the parkway. Fueled by the dotcom bubble, the building boom was the perfect picture of “before-9/11” with its snarled traffic leading in and out of the two-lane entrance to Terminal C south of the entrance and Terminal A north of the entrance.

I had come to this small start-up in mid-2000 at the invitation of its CEO, enticed by an increase in salary and generous stock options. A British media giant had purchased the publishing company where I worked and I was put in charge of custom publications. To facilitate the sale, I signed a non-compete clause that prohibited me from joining a competitive publication. Taking a job in marketing for a start-up was the perfect exit strategy. Furthermore, if the start-up went the way of many others of the time I was hired, my stock options could become worth far more than the hundred or so pages of 8 1/2 by 11 paper they were printed on. That was before the attack on the World Trade Center. Afterwards, the small enterprise watched all the business booked before the attack slowly slip away. Deals about to be signed were abruptly delayed or cancelled outright. The entire house of cards that was the Internet build-out began to crumble, with small ventures like ours that sold to companies doing the building being pulled down in its wake. Business plans that had called for order-of-magnitude growth saw that growth stunted. The stock value of large blue-chip high-tech companies started to plummet as investors fearing the worse sold shares at whatever price they could command.

A few weeks after the attack, I received notice from San Jose Superior Court to report for jury duty. I showed up and explained to the judge that the small company I worked for would lay me off if I went on jury duty. The judge was unsympathetic and the computer system that selects jurors chose me—ironically, the very machine that provided me my livelihood for over 40 years now took it away. I returned to work and informed the CEO I had been chosen for a jury and he broke the news to me that I was being let go. My boss wrote a letter to the court explaining that my job had been eliminated. The one good thing that came out of my layoff was that I got out of jury duty—the judge perhaps feeling remorse for ignoring my initial plea? I walked out of the courthouse ecstatic and terrified at the same time. I was suddenly free not only from the impressed service of the court but my job as well. I knew what it was to be unemployed, and I knew it was going to be more difficult at 56 than at 41—my age the last time I hit the bricks. I was involved in a huge game of musical chairs and a large number of chairs had been removed from the playing field. Those remaining chairs were being coveted by the lucky few with their asses firmly planted and no intention of getting up when the music began to play. I bore my employer no ill will. In fact, I was relieved. They were living on borrowed time and I had to find another game before I was too old to play. They would go under a little over a year later.

My first recourse was to begin looking for freelance work, which I managed to find—small writing jobs that provided cash flow, plus the company had given me a few weeks of severance pay. I rejected the idea of going on unemployment, after all I did have work. However, I had plenty of free time that I spent at trade shows and association gatherings handing out business cards, hitting up acquaintances for work—most had none to offer, and working with others like me who were trying to start businesses of their own. There was no investment money so the endeavors all called for sweat equity—work for free banking of cash eventually coming. All the schemes were based on dotcom models that had little chance of taking hold when potential customers were suspect of anything web based. Starting a company was something to do in addition to applying for job openings working friends put you on to—most of which had a surplus of applicants. At 56 I realized that you don’t find a job, you create one for yourself. Unfortunately, few companies were of a mind to create positions when they were actively eliminating large numbers of existing positions.

Getting up every morning with no job to go to gives you a disquieting feeling, because you’re without a role to play. I was neither an editor nor a marketing guy. I was simply unemployed, someone without a handle for others to recognize your state in the hierarchy of our business society. To eliminate this stigma, I restarted the consulting practice I had the last time I was let go. I printed business cards with a new consulting agency name, Do !nc. (clever the inverted “i” no?). I would go on my morning jog but instead of doing it at 5:30 every morning, I would start at 8:00 when everyone else was rushing out the door to begin work by 9:00. On days when there was a trade show or conference, I would dress up in my sports coat, dress shirt, and slacks and head out the door with a pocketful of Do !nc. business cards. I knew most of the show and conference organizers so I could usually get registered as a member of the press. I was also working freelance for a custom magazine—I had started the publication while still at my last publishing company. Registering as a freelancer for the magazine allowed me entrée I would not otherwise have. I was enjoying the freedom of setting my own schedule, coming and going as I pleased. The only problem was that I wasn’t a real editor anymore. I had been an editor who had left the profession to become a marketing guy—a loss of credibility. Like it or not I had exiled myself from the world I had known for over twenty years. “Consultant” would tide me over until I became a marketing guy once more. The feeling was like getting a divorce after many years together and moving in with another partner who tempted you with the promise of material gain. Once you start living with your new partner you realize how foolish you had been, but knowing you cannot return

By January, 2002 I had landed another job in marketing for another start-up—this one with a higher probability of succeeding than the one I had left—I could extend the personal relationship analogy but I won’t. However, my life had changed and it had nothing to do with the terrorist attack or the economic recession that resulted. Each of us comes into the world with a fuel tank that had a finite amount of gas that each of us uses to propel ourselves down the highway of life. I had driven down one road for the vast majority of my professional life. With a fuel tank below the midpoint of the gas gauge heading toward “E”, I had taken a detour lured not by the prospect of something that I would enjoy doing but rather by the chance for material wealth. I think of that computer program selecting me for jury duty as an omen that stated clearly I had taken a wrong turn—the computer program was not the cause of my demise as I’m sure I would have suffered the same fate without the computer choosing me to serve on the jury. I had been chastened and now I’m looking for a good stretch of road to spend the remaining fuel in my tank.

July 24, 2005 - Shopping Malls and Cinema

July 24, 2005 - Shopping Malls and Cinema

It’s hotter than hell in south San Jose this Sunday and the only relief is the air conditioned comfort of Oakridge Mall, which is where my wife IM and I go right after breakfast, arriving just at 11:00, a half hour before the start time for “March of the Penguins”. Oakridge is located on Blossom Hill Road at its junction with Santa Teresa Boulevard. We walk about the light-foot-trafficked mall, window shopping, remembering what the place was like before the Sydney, Australia-based Westfield Group, the largest retail property group in the world, purchased the center from Toronto-based TrizecHahn Corp. in 1998. Oakridge was one of 12 malls that Westfield purchased that year. Westfield expanded the original center by 30 percent to make room for new shops, restaurants, and a 20-screen Century Theater—where we were bound today. In the expansion, it created two awful multi-level parking garages on the west and east side of the mall. Getting in and out of either structure is a nightmare when traffic gets heavy. We had arrived early and found parking on the second level sheltered from an irate sun that promised a 100-degree (Fahrenheit) temperature today.

IM and I grew up with the shopping center, as we know it today—though generations before and since have seen different incarnations of this international homage to consumerism. Steve Schoenherr, Professor of History at the University of San Diego in his history of the shopping mall (http://home.sandiego.edu/~ses/) traces them back to ancient agoras and medieval piazzas of European cities. But the shopping center we grew up with owes its existence to the automobile. When IM and I first started our life together, the shopping center was a place to window-shop for goods our very tight budget could ill afford. It was a place we would come to spurge on a meal out. But mostly it was a great place to take the kids and let them run around in relative safety. When we arrived in Dallas in October 1968, we passed the incredible Northpark Mall Shopping Center on Central Expressway on the northwest corner of its intersection with Texas Loop 12, driving north to Plano, Texas where we would settle.

Northpark Mall was the creation of Raymond D. Nasher who in the early 1960s leased a 97-acre cotton field where the shopping mall sits today to build the then largest climate-controlled retail-shopping complex in the world. The center was completed in 1965 just three years before we arrived. However, the Northpark Shopping Mall was not new to Dallas. In 1906 entrepreneur John S. Armstrong purchased 1,326 acres of land bisected by what is now Preston Road. He created the town of Highland Park (now part of Dallas)—a planned community of upscale homes built around Turtle Creek. In 1912, his sons-in-law, Hugh Prather and Edgar Flippen, brought into the town the Dallas Country Club, the oldest country club in Texas. In 1931, Hugh Prather designed the Mediterranean-style Highland Park Shopping Village with storefronts facing an inner parking lot. The mall was made a National Historic Landmark in 2000 as it represented a milestone in the development of the shopping center as a distinctive form of 20th century American architecture, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

However, Northpark outdid Highland Park in a couple of ways. Foremost, Northpark was enclosed and shoppers were sheltered from the humid heat that plagues Dallas for a good part of the year. Air conditioning attracted marginal shoppers like IM and me who would come to hang out; we were the mall’s future customers. In addition, the mall with its climate control environment became a public exhibition venue for Nasher’s extensive collection of 20th Century sculpture and modern art. The collection included works by Jonathan Borofsky, Andy Warhol, Henry Moore, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, among others—many being rotated throughout the mall over time. I suspect that Nasher built the profit-generating center solely as a showcase for his art having no other local outlet for his passion. Nevertheless, it was the perfect place for the masses to view great art. It was a popular place for mall walking too, women in fashionable exercise attire could safely power walk the length of the mall before the crowds of shopper arrived.

Shortly after we arrived, Dallas experienced a shopping center building boom each a reproduction of one another—the first being Valley View, just off Interstate 635—the LBJ Freeway just a bit west of Central Expressway. None of the new malls had the distinction of Northpark or Highland Park. When we arrived in San Jose in 1974, the one thing we noticed was a lack of shopping malls. East on Tully road a mile or so from California 101, we found Eastridge Shopping Center. The other shopping complex was Valley Fair and Town & Country Village on opposite sides of Stevens Creek Blvd just west of Interstate 880. The T&C shopping center was where Santana Row now sits. And there was Oakridge, which back then was a single-corridor, enclosed mall with Sears anchoring the complex on the west, Montgomery Wards on the East, and Macy’s in the middle. The old Town & Country Village implemented the concept of a “town” which was embodied in Highland Park, opting for a Spanish mission look and feel, with two long rows of stores that you accessed via one-way streets perpendicular to Stevens Creek Blvd. The one remaining T&C is in Palo Alto at the intersection of Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real, just south of Stanford Shopping Center, which embodies the open air idea of Highland Park—more practical than in Dallas as Palo Alto’s temperature swings between 50s to 80s Fahrenheit during the summer months with modest humidity.

With Oakridge Mall, the Westfield Group opted to up date the old center and make it into what Schoenherr calls an Entertainment Center; the Sony Metreon being a prime example: a fifteen screen movie theatre with restaurants scattered throughout and a number of retail outlets, selling mostly toys, consumer electronics, and sundries. Oakridge added the Century 20 movie theatre and a handful of chain restaurants: Cheesecake Factory, Buca di Beppo, P.F. Chang’s, and a couple of others. IM and I have only recently started coming to Oakridge, mostly to see a movie or to grab a bite at the Cheesecake Factory. As we walked through the mall before the start of our 11:30 movie, IM remarked that all the stores we passed had passed us by. We weren’t their customers. With their goods they were catering to our children and soon our grandchildren. I started to wonder when the shopping mall—so much a part of our early life—stopped being important to us. I think it began when our daughters were in high school and there was no longer any need for us to take them shopping. They were shopping on their own at places like The Limited, Wilson’s Leather, and many others I can no longer remember.

The “March of the Penguins” proved to be a fine movie that tells the story of the Emperor penguins’ annual fall migration from the ocean waters around Antarctica 70 miles inland to a desolate frozen place where they mate and nurture a single egg through the harshest winter on the face of the earth. From the time they leave the sea until the egg is laid neither adult eats. Once the egg arrives, the female who has lost 30 percent of her body weight travels 70 miles back to the sea to feed leaving the male to hatch the egg. She returns after feasting, in time to begin feeding the newborn chick while the male who has lost half his body weight—without food for two months—returns to the sea to feed. Once the chick had grown sufficiently, the two parents return to the sea leaving their juveniles alone to take the plunge and begin fending for themselves—all by instinct. IM and I could relate.

July 21, 2005 – A Lifetime in Public Relations

July 21, 2005 – A Lifetime in Public Relations

Fresh out of Cal State Fullerton with a degree in communications, one Ms. H. Golightly—not her real last name—came into our editorial office on Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale on Monday September 28, 1981. She had a marketing director from Century Data in tow. This was one of her first press tours after taking a job with Jansen Associates, a Newport Beach, California public relations firm. Golightly is your younger sister or at least what she reminded me of: cute as a button and extremely earnest about doing a good job. Besides fellow editors, PR people were the one group that you built close working relations with. They gave you access to people with full calendars and no time to deal with you if you didn’t have an appointment. They were the ones you had great meals with in really nice restaurants, most often with their clients telling you why their latest 8-in. hard drive was better than their competitors and you’re trying to look interested while minding your table manners when you really want to devour the Coq au Vin or some other such delicacy that the waiter has just deposited in front of you. Golightly’s favorite restaurant in Orange County is Antonello’s in the South Coast Plaza Shopping Center. Back then it had no competition. Further north in Anaheim there was The White House, which was Antonello’s equal if not better.

Golightly had a boyfriend, RK, back then whom I really liked. He was a DEC geek before the word “geek” had been invented. He owned a company that specialized in Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) add ons and software. DEC doesn’t exist anymore—having been absorbed by Compaq Computer Corp., which was subsequently eaten by Hewlett Packard. In the history of computing DEC was the company that miniaturized the mainframe computer producing the “minicomputer.” DEC began life in 1957, the brainchild of Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson, both ex-MIT grads working at Lincoln Labs. It produced the DEC PDP-8 (programmable data processor) in 1964—the first minicomputer with a price tag of $16,000, which became an instant hit with anyone in science and engineering. (It was a 12-bit computer.) DEC produced a book entitled “Processor Handbook” that included the instruction set, some basic information on computers and the PDP series specifically. The book, which was free to customers or would be customers, became a much sought after publication on college campuses and among aspiring computer nerds—I still have my copy. RK and a generation of his peers all started companies to feed off the industry emerging around the DEC architecture that began developing in the late 1960s early 1970s.

I had dinner with the two of them at a Moroccan restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway (California Highway 1) one evening. RK was an easygoing fellow who seemed to be conflicted about his life. He was a reluctant entrepreneur, a computer nerd being forced into being a businessman. He confessed that he had so lost sight of the technology that he had become a “user.” In techno-speak, it was a slight as obviously you were no longer conversant with the machine. In addition, the responsibility for the welfare of his employees was weighing on him. He kept talking about running off to Baja to make a living off the sea or some such scheme. There were many CEO like RK in the DEC add-on business. Another CEO I met in Chatsworth, AD was a Naval officer who left the service to start his enterprise. He had a full bar in the basement of the company’s office building. After business hours employees had access to the full bar, complements of the company. I can’t recall who tended bar. AD confided in me that he had more than one employee who spent too much time at the bar and he felt a bit responsible for encouraging their habit. Both RK and AD were anti-CEOs, who built their company while maintaining a certain unorthodoxy that separated them from Big Blue with its legions of dark-suited, white-shirted, wing-tip-shod professionals. I liked these guys because they didn’t take themselves too seriously. Unfortunately they and most all their peers went the way of DEC.

During another visit in Orange County less than a year later, RK had gone and Golightly was heartbroken, though you would never know it during the meeting she had arranged for me. I learned of RK’s flight afterwards as we chatted before I had to run off to another meeting. Golightly bounced back and six months or so later she again walked into our editorial offices on Mary Avenue with a CEO in tow. His name was CM and he had taken over the helm of a major reel-to-reel tape drive manufacturer. CM was a Brit and after we chatted briefly in our offices, Golightly suggested we finish our conversation over lunch—the Lion & Compass. As we leave the building I offer to drive only to have Golightly point us all to a waiting stretch limo she had hired to haul CM and her to the appointments throughout the day. I rolled my eyes at her and she explained that this eliminated the need for rental car and the possibility of getting lost—the driver had been given the itinerary in advance. Not only was it practical, it was precisely the perk that made CM take note of Golightly’s efficiency.

Somewhere toward the latter part of the 1980s, Golightly’s clients no longer had a need for the magazine I worked for. I didn’t realize it but my publication was increasingly being marginalized by the new crop of publications formed to serve the rapidly developing personal computer market. Savvy PR people like Golightly were adapting and building relationships with the next generation of editors. When my oldest daughter ME graduated high school and began attending UC Irvine, Golightly had gone to work for another advertising and PR agency. When I had occasion to speak with her she mentioned that the agency needed part time help and I suggested my daughter, who interviewed and got the job. The two have kept in touch ever since. During that time, Golightly found a great guy, got married, and had a son, who is now grown. Golightly has since become an independent consultant with her own agency: a lifetime in just over a 1,000-words.

July 20, 2005 – Midlife Crisis January 1982

July 20, 2005 – Midlife Crisis January 1982


It’s Tuesday evening January 12, 1982 and I’m en route from LAX to Austin’s Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, International Air Transport Association (IATA) code AUS. I’m three years away from turning 40, a time you begin to ask the tough question: what have you done with your life? Up to now, I have been on a random walk through life, with a long-term goal to apply my degree in economics to some end. I ended up in publishing half-way through my night school effort at the University of Santa Clara to acquire a master’s degree in economics. GL, who owned an ad agency, suggested I apply for an editor’s job for a computer magazine. My random walk suddenly had a direction. That was 1977, when I was 32. Five years later and I’m questioning the wisdom of my choice of path. I say five years because that seems the interval between times for introspection.

The other reason for my self-examination was I had just gotten a promotion and put onto a new publication—I should have be ecstatic but instead I’m asking whether I should be doing something else and why haven’t I gotten further along in life—whatever that means. I’m filled with a sense of impatience as I wing my way through the night into the heart of Texas. If there is one word to describe the years immediately after graduating college it would be impatience—I constantly felt compelled to hurry up. Waiting in line was a waste of time; if I had to wait then I had to have something to occupy myself during the period. The need to constantly have something to do was another compulsion. The purpose of this trip was to do a couple of interviews and to carry out fact-finding PR visits. I was producing more and longer articles than my new magazine could publish. My need to write found vent in providing writing service to PR agencies and individual companies who needed written material generated—brochures, data sheets, speeches, annual reports, etc. And there was the book on hard drives I was planning to write—collecting information during PR visits and at conference where all the drive vendors congregated.

I could not control these impulses and when I was with my wife IM and our two daughters there was an agenda to everything we did. A trip to Monterey included a forced march through the Aquarium—one of the best you’ll find; a visit to Robert Lewis Stevenson’s house, and some other activity that would fill our time with purpose and meaning. An entry in my day timer for Saturday January 30 showed that I cancelled an appointment to donate blood, went for a jog in the morning, completed a freelance assignment and then took everyone to see Chariots of Fire, and afterwards came home and completed a book entitled Bullet Park. Sunday showed I completed a Jerzy Kosinki book—I have a habit of reading several books at once, finished up another freelance assignment begun earlier in the week, and started work on a speech I had to deliver in London on February 16th. IM and the girls would on occasion rebel but they did get caught up in my mania.

This trip was typical of the schedule I felt compelled to keep. I had asked the PR department at the large semiconductor company I’m visiting in Austin to fill my calendar with visits to as many departments in the company that I could see from 8:00AM until I had to leave for the airport at 4:30PM to catch a 6:00PM flight to Dallas IATA code DFW—not Love Field, the older airport just north of downtown Dallas. I gave myself an hour and a half to anticipate the worse case traffic during Austin rush hour—the company I’m visiting is out in the burbs. Recognizing an opportunity to make points within the marketing departments of their company, the PR folks fill my day with a breakfast meeting at the Austin Marriot where I spent the night and a lunch meeting and all the times in between on hour-long intervals. When I left, my notebook was clogged full of information on a variety of semiconductor chips, boards, and systems. About a tenth of the information I amassed would see publication if that—a monthly magazine containing between 80 and 128 pages can only print less than half that number of editorial pages. And there were four editors all contributing copy. This was before the advent of the Internet where one web site can consume far more content than any one person could ever hope to produce.

Wednesday began with a breakfast meeting in Austin and ended with a dinner meeting in Dallas with an attractive PR lady from another large semiconductor company I was scheduled to visit on Thursday. I got into DFW, rented a car, and checked into the Carlton Hotel, a residence hotel that resembled condos rather than a hotel/motel, located across Central Expressway from the large semiconductor company I was to visit. GR, the PR lady, picked me up and drove us to the Mansion on Turtle Creek for dinner. The restaurant is part of a hotel fashioned in 1978 from a Texas cotton baron’s home built in 1925. If you can believe, a 16th-century, Italian Renaissance-style mansion, in the middle of the posh Dallas North Neighborhood, Turtle Creek. We were dining on a corporate expense account, so we discussed the agenda for Thursday—I was interviewing a corporate executive for a profile in the March 1982 issue. Dinner lasted close to two hours and I got back to the Carlton in time to put some of what I had in my notes from earlier in the day in a more understandable form before turning in.

I like coming back to Dallas, especially now that I have the option to come and go as I pleased. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, IM and I were scratching out a living with me working full time and going to school at night. We lived on a strict budget and longed for the day we could move to California. Coming back always reminds me that I’ve moved on in my life. Besides the visiting the large semiconductor company, I also had an appointment to meet with Mostek, one of the earlier semiconductor companies making memory components. It was once an innovative force in the industry, but the following year it would be sold to United Technologies who two years later would sell what was left of it to a Franco-Italian semiconductor company. It was a business case for the rags to riches to rags in the high-tech industry.

My weeklong PR junket would have one more stop in Phoenix where I would meet with another large semiconductor company. I got into PHX, Sky Harbor Airport—IM loves the name—right at 7:00PM collected my rental car and drove to the Doubletree Paradise Valley, at the corner of Jackrabbit and Scottsdale Road. Phoenix reminds me of El Paso—the desert and heat. It’s the big city between LA and El Paso on Interstate 10, which back then was not completed all the way through Phoenix and remained that way for quite a few of the trips we made between San Jose and El Paso for Christmas. The last day of a weeklong trip was spent doing PR visits before getting on my return plane to San Jose at 6:00PM.

After one of these trips I always feel as if I’ve got nothing done for a week and need to get caught up somehow. The feeling only exacerbates the sense of going down the wrong road in life. It passes, however, as I contemplate what other road I would find interesting. The one advantage to working in publishing is that it suits my attention deficit disordered personality. I get bored easily and loose interest in topics as soon as I’ve gotten over its novelty. No other profession in the world lends itself so well to my personality trait. I would stay on the road I’d chosen in 1977 for twenty-three years—so much for midlife crisis changing my life.

July 19, 2005 – An Odyssey to Southern California

July 19, 2005 – An Odyssey to Southern California

I have just returned from four days being away from who I am. Now, that I’m back I’m trying to describe who it was I spent the last four days being. I started being someone else, the moment my wife IM and I drove out the driveway of our house and stopped at Holder's Country Inn in the strip mall at the junction of Blossom Hill Road and Monterey Highway in San Jose. It was about 10:00AM on Thursday morning last week. We were planning a day on the Central Coast before visiting our youngest daughter RD and out two grandkids, CK and CB—their nicknames—for the weekend. The Country Inn proved to have quite a good breakfast to fill up for our half-day drive to Cambria, our favorite spot along California Highway 1, with its rugged coastline.

I got up on Thursday morning but didn’t get ready for work as per usual, instead I packed my overnight case for the trip south, the routine that described who I was during the workweek changed. As a result, I changed as well. The first thing I noticed different about myself that morning was I was no longer the worker with an 8:00AM to 5:00PM job. I was someone with no corporate affiliations or responsibilities for that day. At work, I didn’t exist. My desk at the office where I’m employed off Embarcadero Road on the east side of California 101 was empty. I had become the traveler, one of many people spending time doing things that were out of the ordinary. One of those things was having a late breakfast on a weekday at the Country Inn—the best hash browns I’ve had in a long time.

I had brought along the last three CDs of the unabridged audio book of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, which I planned to complete sometime in the next few days. Also in my bag of to do’s I had brought my notebook containing my scribbling about the book and other readings I’ve been doing recently. I have a terrible time remembering what I read or observe unless I write it down. The act of hand putting on paper thoughts I have in my head seems to ensure the information finds a place in my memory, which had been overfilled with technical minutiae for the past nearly 40 years. If I can’t bring something to mind, I can usually remember what notebook I recorded the information in so I can find it there. The terrible truth is that my mind has taken to storing information in notebooks and mentally indexing which notebooks contain what material.

That’s the other part about being the traveler. What I put in my notebook changed. The traveler not the worker was recording information beginning Thursday. The worker would have made entries in this notebook only after normal business hours. Moreover, the worker has a different notebook in which he records business information—yes sometimes the two get mixed up as both are identical in appearance. The traveler began by entering information into the notebook mid-morning when it would otherwise be closed. His entry was about the trip, which started in earnest after breakfast when IM and I drove onto 101 at the southbound on-ramp right off Blossom Hill Road just west of its intersection with Monterey Highway.

The entry described the journey’s objective, a drive down 101 to Cambria, which had last been undertaken in spring this year. However, the trip along El Camino Real—101’s more glamorous name given the trail by the Spanish to denote the road that connected its system of missions along the length of the state—would continue on Friday beyond Cambria through LA into Orange County. Besides revisiting landscapes beyond Cambria, IM and I hadn’t seen in several years, we had to meet with a real estate agent to list a property in Orange County for sale—the Southland is all about real estate, developing it, nurturing its value, and selling it for speculative profit. Saturday would be spent enjoying grandkids. Sunday would be consumed driving back north along the much speedier Interstate 5, which slices the western United States from the Mexican Border all the way to the U.S.-Canadian boundary. I 5 is about speed; 101 is about the romance of travel. Both would affect the traveler and his wife in the next four days.

The traveler drives differently than the worker, who sets out in the morning on a 40-minute drive. The route is so routine that the worker can drive it while devoting most of his attention to an audio book—Pattern Recognition mentioned earlier, which is what the worker had been doing the early part of last week and most of the week before: through San Jose starting at Monterey Highway, getting on Interstate 880 northbound at the North First Street On-Ramp, exiting onto northbound 101 a half mile later and staying on 101 until Embarcadero. Traffic back-ups occurring at the 880-101 interchange followed by another slow and go stretch a mile north when California 87 empties onto 101 north, followed by another slowdown further north where California 85 empties onto 101 north, about five miles south of the Embarcadero Road Exit. This routine occurs five days a week like clockwork—leave at 7:00AM, arrive between 7:40AM and 8:00AM every day. An oscilloscope works by sampling an event that is supposed to happen at a prescribed interval of time. A screen shows that sample, but it’s really a composite of countless samples all overlaid over one another. That is the worker. Sample his routine on Monday one week, another day of the week some time later and so on until you’ve sampled every day over a period of several weeks. The result is you see what the worker is for every day on the week.

The traveler has no such routine. The drive south is not predictable, though 30 years of driving south on 101 a few times a year does suggest some repetition. The traveler is looking to escape the routine of the worker, liberated from a timetable and schedule. And yet, he’s not escaping these confines, since the time he’s allotted for this indulgence is finite—96 hours to be precise. The trip south on 101 will consume three hours—the breakfast took another, and by 2:30PM the traveler and his wife are settled into an ocean-view room at the Cypress Cove Inn in Cambria looking at a coastline obscured by a shroud of fog that has kept the temperature in the range of 60 degrees Fahrenheit while the length of California along which the traveler has driven is baking in temperatures over 100 degrees F. The traveler is contemplating life after work. What would it be like to no longer be a worker, to have no routine for him to drive each day, nor any income that said routine generates.

There was a time I had been without a job to attend to each day and without the income that would have resulted. I realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in what I did and the amount of revenue it produced. Before my loss of job, I had been a Director of Marketing for a small start-up. I was thus described as “marketing guy.” Before joining the start-up, I had been editor, thus described as “purveyor of information.” The former had the connotation of someone whose pronouncements should not be taken seriously—as most of it was probably intended to present facts with an underlying agenda. The latter suggested someone producing information with less bias, but certainly not complete nor totally objective. That time off reminded me of myself as a young teen before I had acquired a handle to identify myself to the rest of the world. Back then I did what I enjoyed doing each day and dreamt of when I would be somebody other than a kid, somebody with places to go and people to see. Since then, I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of people and all of it has conspired to make me the worker I am today.

The traveler on the other hand has nothing to identify him to the rest of the world save the material possessions he wraps himself in, a late model European car; a 60-year old physical structure—apparent from salt and pepper hair (more the former than the latter—and the unyouthful skin of an older man; jeans, sport shirts, and running shoes—the uniform of today’s traveler. However, no one can tell that he has two grown daughters and four grandkids, and two elderly, self-sufficient parents with their wits intact. They can’t tell from observation that he’s a marketing guy, what his net worth is, and whether or not he’s a success or failure in life. The last one is the tough one especially for the traveler: “Have you succeeded in doing what you set out to do so many years ago?”

The road traveling south from Cambria is California 1, the most scenic highway you’ll ever find. You pass the tiny towns of Harmony, then the larger Cayucos—which looks more like a Baja California fishing village, the much larger Morro Bay, and finally the largest of the lot San Luis Obispo. Between Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo along the way you pass, the California Men’s Penal Colony, a California National Guard Camp, a Sheriff’s Department Facility, and California Polytechnic State University: punishment, defense and education—government defined. San Luis Obispo is the border between Northern and Southern California and the contrast is nowhere more obvious than Atascadero—actually Shell Beach, just a bit north—where IM and I stop for breakfast.

This is where large-scale real estate development begins. Since we began traveling south 30 years ago, the western side of 101 through Atascadero has become covered with condos and single-family dwellings all staring out into the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean. At Shell Beach we exit 101 for Breakfast at the Cliffs Resort on Shell Beach Road. There the parking lot is full and we end up breakfasting at the Spyglass Inn just south of its more upscale neighbor. In between the two hotels a half block from the freeway, a completely new resort development is rushing to completion. Just 44 miles up the road in Cambria, residents successfully blocked the efforts of the Hearst Corporation to build a resort hotel on Highway 1 just off the San Simeon coast, at the bottom of the circuitous drive up to Hearst’s Castle: Southern California versus Northern California. At heart, I’m of the Northern Persuasion and I’m reminded of that as we enjoy breakfast looking out at a beautiful overcast view of the Pacific.

By the time breakfast is over it’s after 11:00AM and we begin our journey in earnest toward the megalopolis of LA-Orange County. Beyond Atascadero, 101 traverses countless coastal acres of agriculture: broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, etc. not to mention the hectares devoted to flowers—though neat rows of vineyards are starting to encroach on this green grocer’s dream: Northern California’s invasion of its southern neighbor. The stretch of 101 through Santa Barbara speaks to the other California development: exploitation of mineral resources. In the north after the Forty Niners stripped the land—expanding outward from Sutter’s Mill—of every ounce of gold that could be picked, shoveled, or blasted by high pressure water, the south began sucking up its black gold. The story can be repeated for every valuable mineral California seemed to have in abundance like silver. The north in my time on the face of the earth has turned to exploiting intellectual wealth of its inhabitance. The south has continued to extract wealth from the human hunger for escape into myth and fantasy.

The road south from Santa Barbara is a journey through continuously expanding population growth, once small towns such as Carpinteria, Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Woodland Hills, and Sherman Oaks becoming densely populated, stripped-mall-laced suburbs, each a growing Micropolis. Many of these places were once young like the traveler but now have lived over half a century and have grown in size, its younger self distinctly showing signs of age. The traveler leaves 101 at Interstate 405 and joins the bumper-to-bumper, slow-and-go, midday traffic of LA on a Friday afternoon. Backups extending the length of the 405 past the new Getty Museum perched atop a smog-encased promontory across from ironically named Bel Air; past Interstate 10 one way pointing to the Santa Monica and the Pacific beyond, the other pointing east toward the southwestern heartland of America; past The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center; to just beyond LAX. From there the freeway picks up speed for those in the carpool lane; for the rest it remains commute hell. The traveler and his wife spend a full hour reaching the carpool lane after joining the 405. They spend another full hour negotiating the varying speed carpool lane through Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach before finally arriving at their destination in Irvine.

The traveler has much in common with this state. He is torn between the material wealth from unbridled growth, epitomized by the south, and the introspective, restrained growth of the north. In that sense he is a contradiction: driving a petroleum-hungry automobile over 400 miles all the while lamenting the loss of open space to development. Ask him if he could be content living in bucolic Cambria and he will say no. The slow-paced life, the lack of modern conveniences, and absence of the go-go excitement of a large city—its drawbacks notwithstanding—would drive him mad. This self-realization happens during each of these journeys as the traveler and his wife try to envision themselves living in any of the towns or larger cities along 101. This, they realize is not who they are. The traveler is a denizen of the modern world and is content to swim in its petrocarbon pollution, though given a choice between LA and San Jose, he would always pick the latter.

July 12, 2005 – Finding My Muse in Oxford

July 12, 2005 – Finding My Muse in Oxford

It’s Monday February 15, 1982. I’ve rented a car and I’m now driving out of London en route to Oxford. I manage to get out of the city without getting lost. This is remarkable for me since I’m by myself. The first time I drove in the UK in 1978, my wife IM navigated and she always managed to get us to where we were going. I’m now on my own having to go by instinct and what I remember from my study of the London map, early this morning over breakfast at the Royal Lancaster Hotel where I’m staying while in London. I’m being extra cautious trying to get a feel for being on the opposite side of the car, shifting with my left hand. I head west on Bayswater Road from the hotel then left onto Glouster Place north to Marylebone Road where I turn left. Marylebone Road turns into a flyover that will become the M40 heading west toward Oxford, which along with places like Harvard, the Sorbonne, Stanford, have become synonymous with hard-core schooling.

If you look at a map of Great Britain, both Oxford and Cambridge are completely absent motorways—the British name for freeways. The M-40 bypasses the main part of Oxford as it streaks toward Warwick and its motorway terminus at the M-5. The M-11 ends at Cambridge. Oxford sits in triangle formed by the M1, the M6, and the M40. Due north from London the major Motorway is the M1 that takes you to Leicester, Nottingham, and Leads. Just south of Leicester, the M1 joins the M6, which heads north and west to Birmingham, Manchester and on into Scotland. Due west out of London, the major motorway is the M4, which races to Heathrow, Reading, Bristol, and onward into Wales through Cardiff to Swansea. This will be my first trip to Oxford, the beginning of a decade-long relationship, the demise of which, I still lament. My wife IM and I were back two years ago, but it’s different when you go to a place to meet someone than when you don’t. In the first case you feel like a guest, in the second you feel like a tourist. I much prefer the former, which is what I am today.

I arrive 30 minutes late having gotten lost on at least two different roundabouts coming into the city. TP my host is unfazed by my late arrival—or out of courtesy overlooks my tardiness, attributing it to my being a Californian. My wife IM, who, having been born in Scotland and educated in Catholic Schools, puts a very high premium on punctuality, something as British as the art of queuing up ordering for boarding buses, entering school, etc. She has been early for every appointment she has ever had. And after these many years together, I’ve adopted her ways and have made it a point to be on time. It’s an easy way to show respect for others, IM would say—and it is.

TP says we should go to lunch as he has reservations for 1315 and it’s now 1300. The office is on Banbury Road a short drive from the city center and we make it at our appointed time after happening on a parking space near the restaurant, close by the Oxford Covered Market. It’s actually a pub that serves food and we are seated and served. TP has a lager; I have a glass of red wine. I’m not much into beers or distilled spirits, but have imbibed both in a pinch. TP and I know a good deal about one another having spoken on the phone quite often and we always manage a bit of social conversation in addition to business. I have committed to produce a manuscript on hard drives for Elsevier and we’re discussing the outline of the book and TP is offering advice on what I should include and what I should avoid. Since I write for a U.S. technical magazine, TP is of a mind that I can sell the book to magazine subscribers and has asked if my magazine might help publicize the book—I say they probably will and they do.

We wonder around the Oxford Covered Market after lunch. The place resembles a farmer’s market—with green grocers, fishmongers, butchers, and fowlers, that has been hijacked by a flee market with merchants in their stalls selling everything imaginable. There’s been a market at the block along High Street in the city center since the mid 1700s if not before. I get the distinct impression that some of those working the many stalls of the market might have sprung from descendents of those early 1700s merchants. The city is such a contrast for someone like me from California where the oldest building is barely 100 years old. Indeed, California as we know it only came into being since the middle of the 19th century. Oxford by contrast can claim its founding in 900 AD. Its existence is recorded in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of 912. Oxford’s many structures dating back 100s of years unnerve my sense of reality accustom to being surrounded by modern architecture. The routine of Oxford’s everyday life is also bewildering. Since everyone drives on the left side of the road, approaching pedestrians also pass on the left and I have to consciously remember to go contrary to my normal instinct. It is also this cultural disorientation that forces me to see the world from an entirely different perspective and I always invariably see something I had overlooked or never saw before.

The other great place in Oxford that I’ve had a great affection for is Blackwell’s Book Store on the north side of Broad Street. It would be the one bookstore that carried the book I would write. If I needed a muse to spur my effort to put this book on paper, I had found it in Oxford and specifically in Blackwell’s.

July 10, 2005 – Confronting My Fear in London

July 10, 2005 – Confronting My Fear in London

It’s Sunday February 14th 1982. I’ve just checked into the Royal Lancaster Hotel located on Bayswater Road at Lancaster Gate across from Hyde Park. I’m wearing jeans, sports shirt and running shoes and boy am I under dressed. The flight arrived around 1400 hours and I’ve gotten to the hotel a little before 1600 hours. Settled into my room, I get a call from RB, a lecturer at the Polytechnic of North London on Holloway Road. He’s in the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering. He lives in Guildford with his wife WB and little boy, who I never got to meet. I’ve been trying to remember how I came to know RB, but my failing memory has hidden it from me. For a few years in the early 80s, RB and I corresponded and hung during his frequent visits to Silicon Valley. RB asks about my flight and after we exchange pleasantries, he asks if I’m up to dinner, to which I respond that I am and he says he’ll call at around 1900 hours.

I’m in London because RB invited me to speak at a conference on Computer Technology he’s producing at the Royal Lancaster conference facility next Tuesday. Frankly the prospect scares me to death, but I’m here because I’m trying to transcend my past. Since I can remember, the thought of public speaking has caused me no end of anxiety. In my first year of high school French, we are required to recite before the class and it takes every ounce of self-control to keep from throwing up and to get through the minute of reading French before a room full of classmates who are refrained from cat calls and boos by the stern demeanor of our French teacher, a five foot four inch, model-thin beauty in her early 30s with a lovely, rarely smiling face, beautiful brown hair always pulled into a bun. When I’m in front of the class, not wanting to disappoint her is the only reason I’m able to muddle through with an at best average recitation—with her constant exhortation to speak louder. Later, I took two speech classes, required to graduate: in high school in my teens and in college in my early 20s. Suppressing the urge to vomit had evolved into butterflies in my stomach but I still had to be reminded to speak louder—a job that has since fallen to my wife IM, who constantly reminds me that it is difficult to hear me in conversation.

One traumatic public speaking assignment that caused me great anguish was my last economics class before I graduated from the University of Texas. The final examination required a presentation of our final written paper to the class including overhead slides. Writing the paper was easy; putting together the presentation was a nightmare, made even more daunting by having to present before a class of my peers, most of whom I hardly knew at all. I practiced the presentation each night for three days before the final presentation even remembering to speak up. I saw some great presentations on the day I made mine and I realized that this was the way economists communicated their ideas to the world: building a case for your point of view, making your arguments, and defending your findings against a skeptical audience. When I first got my job as an editor at a technical magazine, I thought I had the best of all worlds. I could make my case in print and was never called upon to defend my findings except to the editorial desk. Now, in London I was looking at my economics final all over again.

RB arrives for dinner and we walk to a wine bar—a pub that sells wine instead of beer and also serves meals. It’s near the hotel and on the way we catch up on goings on in our separate parts of the world. RB is an aspiring entrepreneur who hopes to start a company and sell some of his designs for computer add on devices. He’s dabbling in robotics and asks me about some personal robots that Androbot, Inc.—the creation of Nolan Bushnell—was about to unleash on the world. They could be programmed with their own attitude—surly to obsequious. I had heard of the company but had no occasion to cover it since it was a consumer product out of the editorial charter of my magazine. He tells me he’s planning a trip to the Valley in the fall to meet with Bushnell.

Over dinner I convey my concerns about how I’ll do in my presentation to the audience on Tuesday. He assures me that the British audience will not be rude or dismissive and that I have nothing to worry about. He does it all the time and it’s no different than the two of us exchanging ideas. Everyone will have come to hear what you have to tell them he assures me. Hidden behind the wall of paper and the printed word, I have no trouble telling readers what I know, it’s getting up before them to tell them to do the same thing. All that self-confidence that the paper barrier affords me is shaken before a live audience. When I was in high school, I took a drama class and ended up an under study to one of the actors in the Thornton Wilder play The Long Christmas Dinner. I so wanted to conquer my fear and stand up in front of that audience and act my part, but the teacher wisely realized that though I could memorize my lines, I would have a difficult time selling my character to the audience.

Meanwhile, on Monday, I’m visiting Elsevier International Bulletins in Oxford, also the result of a recommendation from RB, to discuss a book on hard disk drives. Back then they were called Winchester Disk Drives after the IBM project for the product that ultimately spawned the industry. I’m to meet TP at Elsevier. I’ve known TP through correspondence and phone conversations for nearly a year. I contribute content for one of TP’s many newsletters.

Tuesday does arrive and I do take the stage with microphone so I can be heard. The audience is just over 50 people who have come to hear what technology developments were going on in the Valley and I do my best explaining what I know. Remarkably, I know a great deal about what’s happening at a whole new crop of microcomputer and peripherals companies and I get going and before I know what has happened I’m being given a notice that I have only five more minutes to talk. I conclude my remarks and take a couple of questions before RB, the moderator, thanks me for my contribution and calls the next speaker. Remarkably the anticipation of the event created far more anxiety than the actual event itself. The conference appearance marked a turning point for me. It made me aware that I had something to say and that I could articulate it clearly to an audience. I would learn over time, that this ability creates more to one’s personal success than being able to communicate the same thoughts on paper.

July 9, 2005 Burning my Candle at Both Ends

July 9, 2005 Burning my Candle at Both Ends

Just after my 36th birthday, I had one of those epiphanies that middle age men are said to have at about this time in their lives. For me it marked a full decade after completing my college education. How many of the milestones had I intended to pass were now behind me? What were the ones to come? And what were my chances of actually putting them behind me? The answer to the first question was that I had not passed the number I thought I should have passed. It was the second week of January 1982. I had flown to LAX from SJC the airport designation for the still-tiny San Jose Airport. The carriers based there with the largest number of flights had names like PSA and AirCal, commuter carriers flying Boeing 737-200s back and forth between San Jose and Southern California. LA was the first stop on a weeklong itinerary that would take me to Texas and back. My trip was largely to make potential advertisers aware of the new magazine Systems & Software, which had been spun out of a very profitable technical magazine serving the electronics engineering community. With the explosion in the late 1970s of cheap microcomputers—under $10,000, a bargain when compared to minicomputers and mainframes selling for $100,000 to over a $1,000,000—publishers were rushing magazines to serve this expanding base of new readers.

After touch down at Burbank Airport Monday morning January 11, 1982, I jump into my Hertz rental car—it’s 8:25 AM—and head for Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley south on Interstate 5—LA freeways are that important they are referred to with the definitive article “the”—to the 101—called the Ventura Freeway, a far more elegant name. At the I5-101 junction, I take the Ventura Freeway west to the De Soto Boulevard Exit. It’s 9:00 AM and since I’m running ahead of schedule I stop to have breakfast at the Denny’s near the exit. Afterwards, I make a series of phone calls to my east coast office and get tied up in small emergencies that I take care of at the expense of running late for my a 10:00 o’clock appointment. My editor, SK, will use half of the copy I’ve submitted last week, but needs another two magazine pages of content by end of the day Eastern Standard Time. I call a research firm I have written for and ask that an executive summary from one of their reports—not one I’ve written— be faxed to my office back east. It’s free publicity and they are more than eager to accommodate. After alerting my boss to look for the fax, I ask to be transferred to the editorial director, LM, who we both report to. I ask her for permission to travel to the UK for the week of February 15th to participate in a conference as a speaker. She approves the request and gives me another assignment to cover a conference in San Francisco the week of February 21st. I call my contact in London, RB, to let him know I’m coming.

I’ve spent a good 45 minutes on the phone—cell phones were not available then and all my calls were from a pay phone using a telephone credit card—the account number I knew by heart and could speed dial. My last call is to alert my host—an account executive with Simon Public Relations, an agency in LA on San Vicente Blvd near the Brentwood Country Club—I’m running late. I drive north on De Soto to Nordhoff Street. There I meet with a once well-know disk drive company, named after the demographic term for “mini city,” which would gained currency 10 years later for the many cities like Chatsworth, Woodland Hills, Simi Valley, etc springing up around metropolitan areas like LA. We discussed flux changes per inch and diameter of and number of platters per drive and the future direction of both—I know it sounds boring but it’s why you can get an infinite amount of MP3s on your Apple iPod today.

My late start at my first appointment puts me behind for my second one of the day. I call ahead to my host, an account executive from the Le Ance and Reiser, Public Relations/Advertising Agency based in Costa Mesa, California, who represents the company, From the disk drive company, I get back on the Ventura Freeway and head west climbing over the Santa Monica Mountains for a noon lunch appointment with the CEO of a suddenly successful microcomputer company that had skyrocketed to success and was now about to fall, though over a slightly longer time. I get started just before noon and take close to 45 minutes to reach my second appointment. The company was located in Thousand Oaks about 25 miles from where I was in Chatsworth on the Ventura Freeway just off the North Ventura Park Road Exit.

Two right turns after I exit from the freeway and I am at the office of the now-defunct company, the creation of the CEO, BH—an engineer—his wife LH, and a PR lady, CE. I’m about a half hour late. In 1978, BH and his wife were wandering around the West Coast Computer Faire, looking for the bits and pieces needed to build the microcomputer that would make them rich. They found all they needed and BH put them together, producing a computer that system integrators packaged with software and sold to small and medium size companies wanting to automate their inventory, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc. I’m greeted by the Le Ance PR account executive and after he introduces me to BH he suggests we talk over lunch.

The PR AE drives us to the Hungry Tiger in Westlake Village nearby the company’s office. I know as well as everyone else in the small community we all orbit in that BH and his wife are breaking up. Over lunch BH and I talk less about business and more about what a married man does once he breaks up with his wife, for example, the finer points of negotiating with comfort women in Las Vegas and where one goes to find them. BH, like most of the rest of the industry, had just returned from Comdex held the previous November in Las Vegas and our conversation had begun discussing what we had observed that was new at the last gathering. Most of our business conversation centered on IBM’s entry into the small computer market. I asked what impact it would have on companies like BH’s. None was his unhesitating reply since the computer he was selling was going into a business while an individual would use the PC—totally different market and that was that.

The start of 1982 had signaled the passage of a milestone for the nascent microcomputer industry, which got its official start in the mid-1970s, when the Intel 8080 microprocessor was first announced to the world. It would take a couple more years for software to come available to make the machines built around the 8080 useful in business applications. The year 1982 saw the debut in July of 1981 of the IBM Datamaster—now that’s a name to conjure with—and the birth of the personal computer industry as we know it today. That same month Microsoft purchased the rights to DOS from Seattle Computer Products—the little company that could have become Microsoft—which would become PC DOS on the Datamaster—and MS DOS on every clone that came along in IBM’s wake. BH’s high-flying company had just been superseded though few at the time knew it, especially BH.

Observing the lament of a man who’s world had come apart at the height of his professional success was like watching a thunderstorm sweep across a vast prairie of suburban development on a 100-degree day and seeing a funnel cloud ripping up that carefully constructed domestic landscape at the same time. The demise of his domestic life was a metaphor for the decline of his professional fortune, though I’m sure he and his wife and their friend CE would walk away from the destruction financially sound. Lunch ran long as lunches do with DH taking more wine than was acceptable for a business lunch even back then. I had limited my intake to one glass, knowing I had at least one more appointment before the day was done not to mention a thirty-minute drive to get there.

We conclude lunch return to BH’s office and after thanking my host; I explain that I have to be getting back to the valley for another meeting. It’s 2:45 PM. I’m going to be nearly thirty minutes late for my next meeting at 3:00 PM. I get back onto the Ventura Freeway driving well above the speed limit heading east back over the Santa Monica Mountains to Chatsworth exiting at Topanga Canyon—essentially retracing my outbound trek—and heading north to Lassen Street, right five blocks to Deering Avenue and then right again. Despite my speeding, traffic on the freeway and getting lost at least once, I arrive an hour late. “Not a problem,” assures the PR account executive from Simon PR and he takes me in and introduces me to the VP of engineering. I’m visiting another disk drive company and we discuss more flux changes, disk sizes, and number of platters.

My ulterior reason for these visits is to gather information for the book I’m writing on the drive and its affect on the microcomputer industry. The book is one of the milestones I expect to pass and I’m on track to do so—it would be published the following year. Unlike my lunch meeting this third one of the day is information rich with details about the business as well as gossip about competitors that I plan to follow up on. The third meeting ends and I’m over an hour late for the last meeting at the Simon PR offices on San Vicente. The AE says he’s already called ahead to explain the delay and he’ll be happy to show me the way to agency—just follow him, which I do. With LA rush hour traffic, we manage to arrive at the agency just before 6:00 PM. Our dinner reservation is at 7:30 at a restaurant nearby, a surprise, my host at the agency, OR, a principle, which means he has nearly a carte blanche expense account for entertaining.

Besides OR, RS from the LA bureau editor for my sister magazine—the electronics journal—has just arrived. He will hear the agency pitch that I’m there to hear then join OR and me for dinner. Once the agency pitch is over—less than 30 minutes acquainting us with the agency’s clients and what they are doing in the next couple of months, we walk next door to the Corkscrew Restaurant for a drink before going to dinner. A round of drinks and some gossip about our betters in the business—who’s moving where, who’s going out of business, who’s sitting on a goldmine. Afterwards, OR takes us to the restaurant he’s been anxious for us to see. We arrive at Le Bistro and as we’re getting seated, OR explains that this is one of Groucho Marx’s favorite places—he likes the cheesecake here and prefers sitting on the second floor, where we end up hopeful of a glimpse of the comic. Before we get into heavy conversation, I excuse myself and call home to speak with my wife IM and my daughters ME and RD. We’re trying to get ME into an all-girls high school and RD hasn’t a care in the world.

After taking and bringing our drink order, the waiter returns with a pedestal atop which was placed a placard with today’s menu printed. He leaves us to study the menu then returns after an extended interval and takes our order. OR says the place is known for its veal dishes and he and I take one of the veal dishes cited on the placard. RS decides on frog’s legs. I like OR a lot. He’s an ex-Marine officer, though I never did find out if he served in Viet Nam—we are about the same age and he most likely did. He’s a bit taller than me, nearly six foot, lacks the hard look that most Marines especially officers have—I suspect he realized the look was a liability in the PR business and changed it. He is remarkable trim considering the dinners like the one we’re having tonight that he must eat far more frequently than me. RS is another matter, a tall Oklahoman, born in Southern California of parents who left the Sooner State for the Golden State, when, it’s hard to tell. RS looks to be about my age and if so his parents like mine spent their young lives in the depression. RS is a tall guy—over six feet—with a football player’s build that is beginning to grow in the middle. He came out of print journalism then did a stint in broadcast before joining the technical trade publications. He was also in the Navy where he learned electronics, like me.

By the time we order, the restaurant has filled up. We’re sitting between a party of four to our left—two elderly couples—and a party of six on our right three Asian couples. About an hour after ordering, the meal arrived along with a bottle of Chardonnay, which OR had requested be served with the main course. Another hour passes before the waiter clears away our dishes and we order coffee and dessert, a piece of that cheesecake that Groucho raves about. By the time we leave the restaurant it’s nearly midnight and I have to drive to Orange County where I have a guaranteed reservations at the Sheraton Hotel in Irvine, near the Orange County Airport, which is small like SJC and hemmed in by suburban development on three sides and the Interstate 405 on the fourth side.

By the time I get back to the agency and claim my car from their garage, I’m anxious about getting to the hotel and getting to sleep. I’ve been running late all day and it has continued into the night. Somewhere just before the 55 Freeway I see the CHP, red lights flashing in my rear view mirror and realize that I’ve been caught speeding. I have not had a speeding ticket in ages and this one shocks me into the realization that I’ve come to expect that I could make up time in transit, something I’ve been doing all day without much success. Bed and sleep would have to wait.

July 6, 2005 – Restaurant at the End of an Era

July 6, 2005 – Restaurant at the End of an Era

I first started going to the Lion & Compass restaurant in 1982 shortly after it opened to rave reviews, including one in the New York Times, which was posted proudly at the entrance to the restaurant. I was working as an editor for a technical magazine and based in the newly named high tech corridor, Silicon Valley—the name coined by himself, president of the agency I previously served: Regis McKenna Advertising and Public Relations. Silicon Valley is physically located in the lush once-agricultural region of the Santa Clara Valley on the Southwestern side of San Francisco Bay. The restaurant is on the corner of Weddell Drive and Fair Oaks, right off 101 on the east side of the freeway in Sunnyvale. As I recall, the site the restaurant was built upon was once home to a drive-in theatre. Back then, I was a frequent guest being entertained at the restaurant by marketing types who wanted me to write nice things about their company and products. Today, my wife IM and I remain regulars—it’s IM’s favorite eatery.

The restaurant has become a symbol or sorts for Silicon Valley, for the generation that frequented its tables and enjoyed the wonderful faire its chefs have prepared over time. Humans have a fascination for great meals. It’s a hunger that is evident from the beginning of recorded history. In his book Courtesans & Fishcakes, James Davidson describes the people of the ancient city of Sybaris in the instep of Italy’s boot as having made food of such importance that they allowed the inventor of a new dish a year’s exclusive use of the recipe. Davidson also describes the noble Sybarite Smindyrides in 572 BCE journeying to Greece to woo the daughter of Cleisthenes ruler of Sicyon. In his entourage were 1000 fishermen, cooks and fowlers to ensure he achieved the culinary standard he enjoyed in Sybaris while on the road. In the heady days of early 1980, the Lion & Compass became the restaurant that raised the standard of dining in Silicon Valley, to what one could expect in San Francisco—a place where Smindrides would have felt right at home without his entourage.

The Lion & Compass began its life at the same time the personal computer became something more than a hobby for most everyone purchasing one. By 1982, the PC had gone portable with the advent of the Osborne and Kaypro machines—they were known back then as luggables since they resembled something slightly larger than a hard side Samsonite briefcase. These PCs were running the CP/M operating system and offering the buyers bundled software that included WordStar—“the” word processing software of the time, and SuperCalc, the most popular spreadsheet program of that era. Both companies where shipping 10,000 units a month with an average selling price of $1600 each—a yearly income of $150 million, not bad for a new company back then. At the same time, the IBM PC debuted in 1981 and it was immediately followed by a collection of clone PCs, the first of which was Compaq Computer out of Houston. With the advent of IBM and its clone, the unit volume of computers began to rise at an accelerating rate. And there was a food chain of chip suppliers and board vendors feeding these PC manufacturers with goods and services, the vast majority being start up companies based in Silicon Valley.

Walking into the Lion & Compass in the early 1980s the visitor would see tables peopled by venture capitalist wooing potential clients: the din of voices striving to be heard as the movers and shakers of the valley came together to do business. And the continuous table hopping as friends would see each other being seated and get up to shake hands ask a quick question, make a date for drinks later, or get a commitment for a formal meeting—have your assistant call my assistant… Back then money was less a concern than having the right people take you public. It was the equivalent to getting the right date for the debutante’s ball.

The wait staffs at the Lion & Compass and every other Silicon Valley eatery were run off their feet trying to keep up with the demanding high-strung clientele—the not infrequent snorts of coke in the restroom recharged energy levels sufficiently to keep up with the pace. The highly refined Erythroxylum coca leaf was the substance of choice in the supercharged world that seemed to have an inexhaustible source of fast money. One Silicon Valley company was purported to deliver the substance in interoffice envelopes. The Aymara and Quechua (modern Inca) Indians chew the Erythroxylum coca leaf to acquire the stimulant that enables working for long stretches at a time. In this country, it was being used for the same purpose only ingesting it in a more concentrated, faster acting form.

The Valley went through a series of ups and downs: 1985, 1989, 1996, and most recently 2001. I know them all. I was touched by each recession, though far less than some of my colleagues, some of who are still reeling. And not only were the downturns devastating for some, the successes were equally disastrous. The president and CEO of a PC clone company takes his company successfully through an IPO and is worth millions on paper. The day his stock ticker starts to trade on NASDAQ, he takes a local Ferrari dealer salesman to lunch at a restaurant in Los Gatos, where alcohol flows and cocaine blows. The two jump in the Ferrari for a ride after lunch, the CEO at the wheel, Somewhere northbound along the curving two lanes of University Avenue, the CEO, driving faster than his substance-impaired judgment could control runs the car off the road and into a ditch at high speed. The CEO is dead at the scene; the passenger severely injured. He had once been the VP of sales at the publishing company I worked for. He had quit a year earlier to take the helm of the PC company. He had reached the epitome of Silicon Valley success and was gone.

The Lion & Compass is now over twenty years old. The young executives whose voices filled the walls of the restaurants four separate dining areas, have all grown old and have lost the frenetic energy of youth and no amount of artificial stimulant is likely to bring it back. Every CEO of a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company who managed to steer the enterprise through four recessions have all now finally retired. Most have become venture capitalist financing the next great venture. At Lunchtime, the restaurant still has a good crowd but the frantic deal making that resembled panic buying in an irrationally exuberant market has subsided.

The aging population is but one of the factors. The other is that the deal making has gone elsewhere, Taiwan, India, Korea, and increasingly to China. There is a Lion & Compass in each of those places where the same frantic energy has been unleashed. But Silicon Valley has a way of redefining itself in the wake of downturns. The PC market gave way to the telecommunications market, which gave way to the Internet market. Ultimately, something new will come along and start the cycle all over again. And, the Lion & Compass will be there to feed the ravenous hunger of the next generation of high-energy executive out to make his or her fortune.

July 4, 2005 – Finding the Salaryman in Tokyo

July 4, 2005 – Finding the Salaryman in Tokyo

I’m in the Keio Plaza Hotel in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo. I arrived late on Monday September 15, 1997 aboard Singapore Airlines Flight SQ998 into Narita Airport, boarded one of the many buses from Narita to Tokyo hotels—you have to purchase a ticket for the bus that has your hotel on its route at a special concession stand at the airport, which I did. The bus dropped me at the Keio Plaza entrance and I checked in, being greeted by a polite desk clerk who spoke English very well. He had my reservation and I was checked in within minutes, given my electronic key card, shown where the elevators were, and told that my one soft side hanging garment bag would be sent up directly. Tired from a day of interviews followed by hours of flying, I walk to the elevators, punch the up button, hear the distinctive ring tone that characterizes a Mitsubishi Elevator as distinctly as the ring of a British Telephone, then board the elevator to my room. No sooner do I walk in the door to my room than the bellman rings my doorbell and brings me my one piece of luggage.

Left alone at last with only my thoughts for company, I look out my hotel room window at the lights of Shinjuku below and marvel at the contrast between what I remember of the district in 1964 and today. Back then I had no fear of finding my way around, having gotten lost numerous times and always finding landmarks that brought me back to the train station from the movie theater, massage parlor, or bar I had been frequenting. Now, gazing at the jungle of high rise buildings that had displaced the single story buildings I remember from thirty years earlier, I realize that it would take me a week of wandering the streets to get that familiarity back. I had no appointments on Tuesday and would do a walkabout of the district surrounding the hotel hoping to acquire that familiarity in a day. My last appointment on Thursday was at a publishing company in one of the many office buildings close by. I would find the building on foot. My other appointments on Wednesday would be in Yokohama and my only concern would be finding the train platform inside Shinjuku Station, which had also grown considerably over the past 30 years.

Tuesday morning after breakfast, I begin walking all around the hotel. My first trek is two blocks to the train station, trying to find the entrance through the gauntlet of the Keio and Odakyu Department stores that hid the station from my hotel. Once inside the train station, I feel like a mouse confronting a maze, so many paths all leading to exits other than the one I entered. I’m looking for a ticket counter to purchase my ticket for Yokohama. I walk about the station for a good half-hour before locating the counter. Ticket in hand, I now try to find the platform that the train for Yokohama will be leaving from. After finding the object of my quest, I then try to find my way back to the station entrance leading to my hotel and in the process, finding the landmarks that will guide me back to the platform early Wednesday morning. My one saving grace the following day is that everyone will be traveling into Tokyo while I’ll be going in the opposite direction.

When I first came to Tokyo, I was 19 years old and I wanted badly to find my place in the world once my tour of duty in the Navy was over. For the moments I spent in Japan’s largest city, I was on leave from my day job, babysitting computers aboard a Navy ship in the Pacific. During my days off, I was instructed to wear civilian clothes so as not to give away the fact that I was in the Navy, which was fine by me. As soon as I arrived in Japan, July 7, 1965, I had two suits made at a tailor near Yokosuka Navy Base, where I was awaiting the arrival of my ship in August from its monthly cruise about the Pacific. The fact that a Navy enlisted man could afford two tailored suits speaks volumes about the strength of the dollar versus the Yen in the mid-1960s. Once outfitted in a black summer weight wool suit, I made my first trip to Tokyo and found a city teaming with men similarly attired to me. The term “salaryman” had not been coined back then but the business-suited men all around me as I walked the streets of the Marunouchi District certainly fit the description.

Here I was essentially “playing the role” of an American equivalent of the Japanese salaryman. Now, as I walked about Shinjuku in my jeans, tennis shoes, and sports shirt—attire common to tourists worldwide—I was struck by the transformation that had overcome me. Where before I had been pretending to be a salaryman, today I was one and the connotation of the term in the wake of the Japanese bubble seemed even more appropriate now. Salaryman had become synonymous with long working hours, low prestige in the corporate hierarchy, absence of significant sources of income other than salary, wage slavery, and (karōshi, or death from overwork). I was a salaryman in every sense of that definition and I had been since the day I began working after leaving the Navy and acquiring my college degree in economics. The definition fit all the way to parenthetical reference to karōshi. Shortly before turning 50 years old, I had been diagnosed with heart disease, the combination of bad genes and a stress filled life that aggravated an already bad combination of factors. About the only thing going for me was I wasn’t sedentary and my years of daily running had moderated damage from the disease. I did have some stock in the company I now worked for, but it was essentially worthless as I would find out later, when it was revealed that my stake in the company had been so diluted over time as to be worth what I paid for them—nothing. In addition, within another decade, my useful years as a salaryman would be coming near to an end.

I had come full circle from my heady days of youth pretending to be what now in old age I had become. On Wednesday after finding my way to Yokohama, I spent the morning and lunch with a company—I’ll call it M.G.—owned by one of my magazine’s largest advertisers in the U.S. They were helping make introductions to Japanese companies who might become advertisers. Two of M.G.’s young sales executives accompanied me to the customers, my magazine was trying to woo. The meetings were social calls. In Japan no business gets done without building a relationship with your customer, something that can take years for an outsider to accomplish. During the train rides between these meetings I engaged my two young hosts and saw in them a desire to transcend the confines of their salaryman role. They had shares in M.G., which turned out to have value several years later when the company was sold. Was it sufficient to allow them to live without their day job? I’ll never know the answer but I’d like to think they did. Both were just starting their lives fresh out of school with a couple of years experience and a young family.

When I returned from Yokohama, I had invited, HM, the sales representative for the old magazine I use to work for out to dinner. He said he would call for me at the Keio and we could walk to a nearby restaurant. He rang me in my room at the appointed time and I met him in the lobby. I hadn’t seen him in four years when I had made the trip to Tokyo with my boss JA and HM had toured us about to advertisers in and around city. We had dinner that night at an izakaya—a cross between a sit down restaurant and a pub—near the Keio Hotel. The name of the place was Izakaya Asahitei. HM was part owner of the small sales rep firm that still sold advertising for my previous employer, but business for the old publication was dwindling and the firm was taking on new publishers to offset the decline. HM and I were about the same age, with children who were grown and on their own—two salarymen sharing an evening commiserating about life in our different worlds.

The following morning I woke early, packed, checked out of the hotel, and left my bags with the bellman for safe keeping. I had a late afternoon flight from Narita, which gave me plenty of time for my morning meeting with the publishing company a few blocks from the hotel. I arrived on time dressed in what I thought was a lightweight suit but I found myself sweating more than normal. Was it the heat and humidity or the prospect of asking for help from an investor.? It was probably a mixture of both. When I arrived I was pleasantly surprised to see SA and SH, from the Japanese’s company U.S. Venture Capital arm. They were in town for regularly scheduled meetings and having them introduce me reduced the awkwardness between host and visitor. My hosts understood that I was a distant relative rather than a total stranger. When the meeting was over, I had lunch with SA and SH, two who were not of the category salaryman. SA the senior of the two paid.

After lunch, I returned to the hotel, collected my luggage and then changed from my suit into jeans, tennis shoes, and sport shirt. I wanted to unburden myself from the trappings of my station in life before boarding United Flight 838 back to the states.

July 3, 2005 – A Weekend Wandering About Singapore

July 3, 2005 – A Weekend Wandering About Singapore

I’m riding to Chiang Kai-shek Airport in a 500 Series Mercedes, the limousine of choice for the Hyatt Hotel Taipei. It’s early morning, Saturday September 13th 1997. At the airport, I board Singapore Airlines Flight 5 (nonstop) bound for Singapore’s Changi airport. The flight is uneventful and we arrive on time. I set foot in this part of Southeast Asia for the first time, my first steps are actually made into a modern airport that is the equal to any I’ve been in throughout the U.S. or Europe: spacious, spotlessly clean, well-ordered, and, best of all, air conditioned. Stepping outside this steel and glass oasis into the equatorial heat of the island of Singapore, I’m instantly drenched in sweat.

I’m standing on an island located at 103 degrees, 48 minutes East Longitude, 1 degree, 22 minutes North Latitude—the closest I’ve ever been to the Equator on land—I crossed it as a sailor on board ship. Today, it was just as hot and muggy as I remembered from my time at sea. Only there is yet another environmental issue to deal with, wildfires burning in neighboring Indonesia, set by Indonesian lumber and plantation companies who were trying to clear land. The fires create a dense blanket of smoke over Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand, making breathing difficult.

The cab driver, who speaks English, takes me to the Westin Plaza at 2 Stamford Road, now Swissotel The Stamford. It’s late afternoon when I check in and I take a short walk to stretch legs cramped after a long flight. Within a half hour, the heat, humidity and smoke get to me and I return to the room. I promise myself to rise early the following day, get a quick jog while the sun is still low on the horizon and spend the day exploring Singapore by foot. In the short time I was outside the hotel, I got the distinct impression of being in a one-time British Colony. Sir Stamford Raffles came to Singapore in 1819 and convinced the British government to increase its presence there to compete with the Dutch, which had been the dominant European trading power in the region for nearly 200.

The Raffles name is everywhere in the city-state, on streets, hotels, shopping centers, etc. Other British names are equally represented: Stamford, Connaught, St Andrews, Havelock, among others. The British were ousted by the Japanese in 1941 and welcomed back in 1945. However, the European educated leaders of Singapore were not in the mood to remain a British Colony. Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew became prime minister in 1959 and ruled for 31 years. In that time, the city-state formed a union with Malaysia in 1963 and backed out of it in 1965. Thereafter, Lee Kuan Yew achieved independence for the country. In the years afterwards, it became the economic success story of the region.

Much of that success was due to exploiting the country's one major asset: human capital. The country embarked on a program of educating its citizenry, especially in engineering disciplines. When U.S. hard disk drive and semiconductor companies went looking for a lower-cost and well-educated workforce, a tax holiday period from corporate tax, and reasonable priced manufacturing facilities, they found it all in Singapore. Major drive maker, Seagate Technology, was early to move to island and the result was a competitive price that kept the Japanese disk drive makers from being major players in the industry. U.S. companies still dominant the hard drive market.

By the time of my visit, however, Singapore’s wage rates had risen, along with corporate tax and real estate costs. Singapore had caught up with Japan, the U.S. and Europe in cost of doing business. Add in the cost of living on the island—a car is a luxury you pay dearly for, as an example, and the island nation has to compete with the world’s other high-tech centers for corporate investment. The country still continues its investment in human capital, however, and the result is a 95 percent literacy rate—citizens 15 years and older can read and write. Moreover, the country is an example of a true meritocracy: the best and brightest are rewarded both with wealth as well as responsibility.

True to my word, I rose on Sunday at about 7:00 AM and jogged along the Singapore River. Out the hotel entrance, northeast on Stamford to North Bridge where I turned south and east until I crossed the river where I followed it east for about twenty minutes then turned and retraced my tracks to the hotel. Showered and refreshed in thin cotton sport shirt and denim jeans, I lounged in the room for a couple of hours before going down for breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. After a leisurely breakfast, I ventured out into the hot, humid, and smoggy Sunday. My first stop was a camera shop on North Bridge that I had passed on my jog. I purchased a disposable camera. It was about a half-hour before noon. I continued south and east on South Bridge Road—its name turns from North Bridge to South Bridge when you cross the river—until I came to North Canal Road. I turn right heading north and east until I reach New Bridge Road where I turn left until I come to Merchant. I make a right on Merchant Street and there find my destination, the Singapore History Museum on 30 Merchant Road. It’s air-conditioned and it’s a welcome relief to be out of the heat and humidity and I take the self-guided tour.

Singapore began its journey to become the nation it is today in 1945 with the defeat of the Japanese and the end of the Second World War. Having been born in November of that year, I felt a kinship to this small country. It had begun its modern life at about the same time as me. Once I had toured the museum, I spent the rest of the day walking about the center of the city. I found Fort Canning Park, a large green space near the city center; walked along River Valley Road passing a Buddhist Temple and several schools. Toward evening as I returned to the hotel, I wandered along Bras Basah Road passing the Raffles Hotel and the War Memorial which sits across from the Westin. After another shower and change of clothes, I had dinner at Prego’s Restaurant in the Westin, got a Grande Latte at Starbucks in the Raffles City Shopping Center, then wandered about the air conditioned shopping mall before returning to the hotel.

My one appointment on Monday was at a semiconductor company a cab ride away from the city center. My meetings that day we