October 24, 2005 – Desperately Seeking My Birthright

October 24, 2005 – Desperately Seeking My Birthright

For most of my upbringing, especially my childhood years, my friends—military dependents—would ask me where I was from. I would answer Manila, The Philippines. And then they would ask me what it was like, Manila. And I would answer that I didn’t know; I had left as an enfant and had no recollection of it save what my mother described to me of her recollections. When I went to Japan and found myself wandering around Tokyo on leave, I would occasionally be mistaken for Japanese, but the mistake quickly realized the moment I spoke in my broken attempt to respond in the language. When I first went to work for Bendix Field Engineering Corp. at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland outside of Washington, DC, I would be asked if I were from the Middle East, Mexico, or the Mediterranean. In more recent times in California, I’m commonly mistaken for Persian, Pakistani, or Indian.

The common misconception of my national origin has made me realize that I have a face, a complexion, and a personal demeanor that is a blank slate. Others read onto it what they perceive me to be, which is flattering of course, but it leaves me questioning who and what I am. I was born in an era when the world had begun to attach a paper record to your life. When my mother and I boarded the Military Sea Transport Ship, the David Shanks, in 1947 for our voyage to the U.S. we had a file containing an “Application for Transportation of Dependents from Overseas to the United States.” It was a form my father completed requesting that his wife and son be transported from Manila to his home in Brooklyn, Mississippi. The America Consulate General provided my mother a Visa to enter the U.S. Being my father’s son, I did not require one. Also included was the paper record of a medical examination that showed no signs of all the diseases that could have barred our passage: plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and social diseases of the day. There was also “Travel Orders” that put us aboard the David Shanks and deposited us in San Francisco in August of 1947. The other occasion I had to travel with my family outside of the Continental U.S. was in 1955 when my father was transferred for a 3-year tour of duty to Fort Buchanan Army Base outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico. My father carried the folder of papers that authorized this travel.

After I enlisted in the U.S. Navy, I had an occasion in 1965 to travel outside the U.S. on my own when I was stationed on the USNS Michelson, home ported at the U.S. Naval Station in Yokosuka, Japan. For that trip, the folder containing the paperwork directing this trip was in my possession. My travel orders as well as my personnel file. This was how each Navy installation identified me and determined what my duties were to be upon reporting for duty. Of course I was expected everywhere I was sent. And had I not showed up, there would have been hell to pay. My travel to Japan was again entirely through military transport. I passed through no Japanese customs or immigration. The fact that I was walking about in Japan in civilian clothes with no other identification except my U.S. Navy ID card spoke tomes of the power of the military. Likewise, when the ship I was serving aboard returned to the U.S. for a month in dry dock to upgrade electronics and repair the ship’s engine and drive systems, we sailed up the Columbia River and disembarked and walked the streets of Portland with no other identification than our Navy ID Card, no U.S. customs, no U.S. immigration.

When I went to work for Bendix and they requested that I adquire a passport in case I needed to travel to overseas facilities, I thought the process would be a simply matter of completing an application form. The military had sent me throughout the world. Surely getting a passport would be no trouble. Alas, it was not an easy process. The passport office requested a copy of my birth certificate, which I didn’t have. I submitted instead a baptismal certificate, which was not sufficient to satisfy the requirement. It had been more than sufficient to get me enlisted in the Navy and to allow me to enjoy all the benefits of military service, the G.I. Bill, two years of electronics education at the Navy’s expense, etc. But, I was no longer in the military; I was a civilian and I needed a passport to travel the world. Several months pass as I attempted to provide the U.S. Department of State, documentation that would suffice in place of a birth certificate. The flow of documents back and forth was making me anxious of my ability to convince the State Department I was entitled to a U.S. passport; notwithstanding a paper trail twenty three years long amassed while living in the U.S. as a fully enfranchised citizen. I was the son of my father, a U.S. citizen and as long as he was there to tell whoever asked “this is my son” I was fine. But what would happen if he wasn’t around? Curiously, my mother, who held a green card until 1957, became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. and could prove her it if she were asked to do so. Being asked by the State Department to prove my claim of U.S. citizenship, I was coming up short.

I suddenly felt completely lost. Without a birth certificate, I could not claim citizenship to either the U.S. or to the country of my birth, The Philippines, where I had no official state record of being born save a baptismal certificate. This situation made me realize that I was adrift, an immigrant to the U.S. afforded citizenship by my birth father; a citizen of The Philippines by being born there—my documented leaving to come to the U.S. identifying the land of my birth. But, I could not provide adequate documentation to justify my claim to either country. The first lines of the poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” by Sir Walter Scott kept coming to mind throughout the months of correspondence with the State Department: “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!…” What ultimately provided credence for the State Department of my claim of citizenship was my father and mother. They each completed individual sworn affidavit declaring the circumstance and whereabouts of my birth. Nine months after my first submission of the application for passport, I finally received in the mail, shortly before my departure from Bendix for a new job at Collins Radio Company in Dallas, Texas. The process had been a humbling experience and I came to appreciate the importance of one’s birthright.

Please find following Sir Walter Scott’s Poem

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (excerpt)
Sir Walter Scott

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

October 23, 2005 - Evolution of the Office

October 23, 2005 - Evolution of the Office

When I first entered the workforce in the summer of 1967, as a technician for Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Greenbelt, Maryland, I wore a suit and tie, the uniform of the day for white collar workers. I worked in an office at the giant NASA complex in Greenbelt, Maryland surrounded by trees—an almost rural setting. The office consisted of an air conditioned computer room with two Univac NTDS 1206 computers—originally built for shipboard use they still had “Battle Short” switches at the top to keep the computer running when the air conditioning stopped working. The two main Navy Gray metal chassis were nearly six feet tall and four feet wide with two doors that swung open to reveal 13 trays that rolled out like drawers to provide access to as many as 10 rows each with 40 slots, each slot containing one 2-in by 2-in. printed circuit card populated with transistor logic. The bottom five trays were devoted to what today would be DRAM memory but back then was tiny core memories—a whopping 32K. The top four trays handle I/O. The three trays below contained the central processor unit. And the one remaining tray was memory controller. The two computers were surrounded by large numbers of 9-track reel-to-reel tape drives—each the size of a refrigerator. There was also an oversized desk with a panel of lights and switches behind a work surface. And there was a teletype machine that provided keyboard and paper tape reader and paper tape punch—this is where technicians created test programs to exercise different parts of the computer during preventative maintenance. The rats nest of wires hooking all these different pieces of equipment were strewn about the area below the raised floor of the computer room, which was enclosed to keep the environment at a consistent temperature.

The offices where we worked were less impressive. Imagine a large room around which were gray metal desks located at intervals all along the four walls enclosing the space with each worker facing the wall, some with electric typewriters—I had one, an IBM with a golf ball print head, others had pen and pencil—all of us were shuffling papers. The room which began the day at 8:00 AM clean and fresh smelling from its nightly cleaning, would end the day in a haze of smoke, the circulating air unable to clear the inside of all the smoke from the pack-a-day smokers puffing away—me included. There was one retired navy Chief Petty Officer who arrived at the same time I did, who had quit smoking. He became my inspiration to give up the habit, though a severe cold that left me gasping for air for nearly a week helped facilitate the process. I quit smoking for the week with no nicotine hunger only relief that I could break. After recovering from my illness, I no longer craved the nicotine and I never went back. However, the retired nave CPO did resume smoking. Afterwards, I became the one lone non-smoker in a room that had me inhaling all the second hand smoke, nonetheless. Surprisingly, I was never tempted to resume the habit.

One element missing from this office was women, though there was a secretarial pool where documents were sent for typing and handling—mailing outside or within the company, filing in project folders, etc. One of their tasks was to prepare student packages for the many classes that the office held. We were continually training technicians on the existing and newly acquired equipment found on the many tracking sites that Bendix maintained worldwide—the Middle East, Spain, Australia, as well as a number of sites in the U.S. Training was ongoing because technicians would leave for better jobs and new hires had to be brought up to speed. In this environment, the secretarial pool was handling the paperwork associated with each of these students. And some of the denizens of my office were the instructors preparing the course materials or in my case preparing test procedures for the computer labs the students would have to accompany the course itself. The other element missing from this office was workers that weren’t white. In fact, I was the only person in the office that wasn’t completely white, though curiously I did not see that I was the odd man out.

All the time I worked at the NASA training center, the world outside was going through the turmoil of the last days of the Viet Nam War, the last days of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s second term as president, the last days of the social revolution that was the decade of the 1960s. Part of that revolution was for equality between male and female workers as well as equality among the races. That inequality was one of the great injustices the social revolution made right in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the act came into being at the hand of the most unlikely president in the White House: LBJ. I’ve often wondered if he pushed the passage of the act to ensure his place in history was not solely that of the president who landed us in the quagmire of the Viet Nam war. It’s a remarkable law in that it states clearly that “…it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin...” It would take over ten years to realize the full potential of that act, but by the start of the 1980’s it had changed the office I worked in completely.

That office was on Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale, California, near the corner of Mary and West Fremont Avenue. It was relatively small with less than 10 people in the office. It was the West Coast office of the publishing company I worked for and it housed sales people and four editors. The sales staff was split among both men and women. The office manager was a woman as well as the receptionist and office clerk. The four editors were all men. In the home office in New Jersey, women comprised 20 percent of the staff and the editor of the publication was a woman. Equality among the races likewise accelerated with an ethnic and racial make up in many offices becoming increasing heterogeneous by the early 1980s. In the 1960s, I saw myself as part of the white work force and my co-workers saw me as one of them. While the world around me struggled for racial equality, I had created my own. A little over a decade later, that equality had become the norm for all skin colors.

October 18, 2005 – A Life in Words

October 18, 2005 – A Life in Words

When I was 17 years old and just about to graduate from high school—I was attending Clover Park High School just south of Tacoma, Washington-my dad invited one of his army buddies to the house for dinner. The friend—I can’t remember his name but I'll call him William—and I were introduced and my dad said, “William is a counselor in the base personnel office. My dad was in the Army and we were stationed at Ft Lewis Army Base where we lived at 5638 Davis Lane: a four bedroom ranch style house in a military suburban housing development that would not look out of place if located outside the military base. It was a nice “Leave-it-to-Beaver” house built on a tree-lined curving street atop a bluff overlooking Interstate 5. The neighborhood was full of families with teenage kids, a few like me finishing school in the spring of 1963 and looking forward to the next passage in their lives. A handful had applied to universities and many of these had been accepted and were on their way in the fall. As for me, I wasn’t ready for college. I needed to see the world; to see and experience some of what I had read about and watched in movies and on television.

William had come over at my father’s invitation, unknown to me, to discuss my career. I had taken a class in journalism at high school and gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a writer. If I was going to see the world I should write about what I saw. William had come with the intention of talking me out of this crazy notion. My father was only trying to steer me in the right direction. He reasoned that the wrong life choice made at such an early age would lead me down a road of regret later in life. Before dinner, William began explaining to me the difficulties facing someone who wanted to be a writer. The number of jobs available in journalism was small while the multitude seeking to fill those positions was great. William cited the example of the number of positions in the Army given over to soldiers writing for the newspaper “Army Times” as compared to the number of soldiers in electronics, for example: a handful for the former and currently an unlimited number for the latter. Electronics was the field to get into in the Navy. I had chosen not to follow my father into the Army but rather enlisted in the Navy to serve out my tour of active duty required of every male born in the U.S. Those who did not enlist would be drafted and I decided it was better to choose my service rather than default of the Army.

William’s advice did not fall on deaf ears. It made a great deal of sense and I was nothing if not practical. When I got into the Navy, I was lucky enough to score well on the entrance examination all new recruits received shortly after arriving in boot camp at San Diego. My test scores made me eligible to be an electronics technician, which is what the Navy ordered me to become by sending me to three separate schools. After two years of learning basic electronic and computer theory in the Navy you would think that I would have enrolled in an engineering program in college when I was discharged. No. Instead, I chose a degree in economics. The truth be told, I lacked the skills to be a good engineer, the Navy testing notwithstanding. A good engineer is a creature of detail and I have to force myself to concentrate on the minutiae. I chose to study the production and distribution and consumption of goods and services and their management—another career William would have warned me against, had he had another shot at counseling my education choice.

The reality, however, was that I wanted four more years of school and I wanted to study whatever I found interesting rather than subjects that would position me for a specific career in life. Just as the Navy had provided me with a skill that made me valuable in the civilian work force—I had a relatively easy time finding work at electronics companies with military contracts—they were now paying me to attend college in the form of the GI Bill. Now, this is critical. As the head of our household and only bread winner for my wife IM and infant daughters ME and RD, my salary working at Collins Radio Company was barely sufficient to cover our monthly living expenses in a two-bedroom apartment in Plano, Texas, right off Highway 75. The GI bill provided a second income that not only covered tuition cost but provided a second income that afforded us a comfortable living, even allowing us to purchase a home two years before I graduated. Tuition costs at the University of Texas at Arlington where I spent the last two years of college and at El Centro Junior College, where I spent the first two, took no more than a fourth of the amount I received from the GI Bill.

As I went through my first two years at El Centro, I loved the liberal arts courses all the freshmen and sophomores were required to take, particularly the English, political science, and introductory economics classes. I was fascinated by the economists who created the discipline: Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, and the giant of my time John Maynard Keynes. In the last two years at the University of Texas, I used all my electives on courses that intrigued me as well, from Victorian English Literature to Western Political Theory to a great course on international economics. I was acquiring a liberal education. All of the managers I had while I worked at Collins were staunched supporters of my going back to school to get my degree. Most of them were retired Army, Navy and Air Force who were old enough to be my father. They must have seen something of their own son in me because they each found work for me even when the company was going through three rounds of layoffs. For a good six months near the end of my time at Collins I was filling orders for manuals from customers the company had sold equipment to.

I had been hired at Collins back in 1968 to be a technical writer documenting new equipment the company was building for military contracts. Collins radios were highly prized by NASA as well as the Air Force. Right after Richard Nixon the 37th President of the United States took office in 1969, the military contracts abruptly dried up. The wellspring that had supported a whole generation of engineers suddenly evaporated leaving flailing fish gasping for air on a rapidly drying riverbed. The resultant draconian change in the military-aerospace community hit Collins Radio very hard. I was luckily assigned to document computer and communications equipment Collins was manufacturing for commercial markets, the company’s last ditch effort to wean itself from government money and make its way in the civilian world. The charismatic founder of the company that bore his name was a self taught engineer and he had gotten it into his head to build a mainframe computer to compete against IBM. To his credit Collins built an innovative computer that formed the message switching front ends to IBM mainframes in American Airlines Sabre Reservation System back then. The company also pioneered one the earliest digital PBX—analog voice signals coming into the PBX were converted into digital packets for routing to and from individual subscribers. Western Electric (WECO) the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995 was a large Collins Radio customer. All of this effort, however, was too little, too late and Collins was absorbed into military aerospace giant Rockwell Corp.

How I came to be a technical writer was a bit of serendipity, which has left me wondering whether you choose your fate or does your fate choose you. My previous employer, Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Greenbelt, Maryland had the contract to maintain the electronic equipment at all NASA’s sites around the world tracking the Gemini and Apollo space craft orbiting the earth and eventually going to the moon. I had been hired to maintain the Univac computers found at the site in Greenbelt, the facility where personnel bound for sites around the world were trained. Without much to do—the Univac were pretty reliable systems and there were several technicians at the site—I was given the assignment to prepare training materials in support of the site’s instructors. This year of experience was all that was needed for me to land the tech writing job opening at Collins in Richardson, Texas just north of Dallas.

When I graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, my resume opened doors that had heretofore been closed or at least less welcoming. It was the spring of 1974, Richard Nixon’s last year in office before having to resign. I had found a job at another military aerospace contractor, E-Systems, in Garland, east and west of Richardson off of Interstate 605, still within the Dallas metropolitan area. The job had nothing to do with my degree and everything to do with my past experience at Collins. This was an intermediate stop on our way west. By September, having been with E-Systems just over half a year, I accepted a job with Diablo Systems in Sunnyvale, California as a technical writer. Just under four years later, after writing technical manuals and marketing literature for Diablo, I would accept my first job as a journalist, the west coast editor for “Computer Design” magazine. Somehow I had taken William’s advice about electronics and just over 15 years later, I would fall into the job he had said were few and far between. Curiously, the reason I got the job was not my journalism ability, nor my degree in economics but rather my acquired knowledge of computers and electronics.

October 16, 2005 – Making Transitions

October 16, 2005 – Making Transitions

I’ve just changed jobs moving from a high tech company based in Palo Alto off Embarcadero Road to another one located in the office complex across Guadalupe Expressway from the entrance to San Jose Mineta International Airport. It is yet another passage I’ve made to another stage in my life. We are all encountering these points in our lives where some significant transition happens. It’s hard to see the significance until later when time has provided you the hindsight to discern it receding into the past, a sign post you would now give a great deal to have recognized it when it came upon you. This is especially true for me as the number of transitions I’ve traversed far out number the remaining number I can hope to look forward to.

As to what has bought me to this nexus, that is the purpose of my discourse. I’ve always viewed Silicon Valley as an enormous goldfield, only different from the legendary one that sparked the state of California into being, by the substance being mined. The first rush was set off by the mineral gold—symbol Au, atomic number 79 in Group Ib the periodic table of the elements; the current one by silicon—symbol Si atomic number 14 in Group IVa. The former is one of the best conductors of electricity, the latter a poorer conductor, but what makes it special is that its conductance can be regulated—made to increase or to decrease, much like the valve in a water pipe under pressure. This characteristic is what made Si so valuable, what engendered an explosion in wealth. I found it ironic that a couple of years back news reports remarked that a single Intel microprocessor had a value greater than its equivalent weight in gold—this was at a time when theft of silicon chips was running high in the valley.

I arrived in the valley during the early 1970s when the silicon rush was well underway but the “mines” weren’t producing at the levels they would a decade later, when silicon demand prompted the creation of ever larger manufacturing giants to produce the valuable substance. My first transition occurred at the end of the 1970s when I stopped working for large corporations and joined first a small marketing agency, then a magazine, published by a relatively small New Jersey publisher. The valley’s next major transition occurred in the 1980s, which saw the era of the Japanese keiretsu, a grouping or family of affiliated transnational companies forming a tight-knit alliance working toward each other's mutual success. They successfully challenged U.S. giants and wrested control of the lion’s share of silicon manufacturing. The industry’s next major change occurred in the 1990s, which saw Korean and Taiwanese enterprises successfully wresting hegemony in silicon production from the keiretsus. Now, with the dawn of the new millennium, the industry is witnessing the next transition, in which China is beginning to challenge Taiwanese and Korean dominance.

Up until the end of the last century, my life has largely been spent reporting on the technology wars these great giants have waged over the past thirty years. I relinquished that responsibility to a new generation of reporters, who like, me are content to chronicle the times we live in rather than participate in them and shaping the direction our times will take. When I did become part of the commercial world of silicon, it had dramatically changed. There were only a handful of companies in Northern California still manufacturing silicon in their own production facilities, and these ventures no longer could expect a future of rapid growth—that had occurred in the late 1970s for those based in the U.S. Furthermore, there were few companies in the valley who specialized in creating chip designs that large semiconductor companies with production capacity manufactured in high volume—that had occurred in the late 1980s, peaking somewhere in the mid 1990s. And finally, there were only a handful of start-up companies selling software intellectual property to the corporations building larger chip designs—they began their rise in the late 1990s, but as luck would have it I found one. Like the other two groups of companies a great deal of the growth had already occurred in the company I just joined, but there were still exceptions to be found. I’m betting I found one.

The history of the silicon gold rush can be seen in the Price Waterhouse Cooper's Moneytree report. In 1995, the accounting firm reported 1,771 venture capital deals worth a total of $7.8 billion. By 2000, the number of new ventures funded had risen to 7,814 worth a total of $105 billion. Last year, PWC reported 2,925 new start-ups received funding worth $21.4 billion. And more telling is where VCs are putting their money, the lion’s share going first to software, then biotech, then various types of communications and networking, which represent the next three most funded types of start-ups. Semiconductors represent the sixth place in order of funding in total dollar amount and number of companies funded.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a great deal of wealth being generated was being disbursed throughout the population. I had friends who had quit working for others and began selling their services. They were enjoying a high standard of living. In the aftermath of the 2000 recession, all of that excess wealth disappeared. Those same friends in 2001 who had prospered years before were now scrambling to land steady employment and finding it increasingly difficult. Jobs they once counted on were being shipped abroad thanks to the Internet to competent workers with a less demanding lifestyle to support. Any job that could be performed on a computer could be done by anyone with a high-speed connection.

What I’ve come to realize over time is the importance amassing wealth becomes as you grow older. It provides self-sufficiency. The more you have the less beholding you are to others. The transition I made in 2000 recognized that I was the one who had to create that independence, by making investments in companies that have the potential to grow wealth—the other distinction between the gold and silicon gold rush, the former consumed tangible natural resource, the latter appears to create it out of imagination. This will be the third company I have made an investment of my human capital in since rejoining the workaday world. All have been software companies. The first was short-lived—a year—killed by the dotcom implosion that devastated many dreams, mine included. The one I’ve just found holds the promise to find that lost hope. I'm hoping that in hindsight, this will represent the major transition my wife IM and I need at this point in our lives.

When I was a kid in the fourth and fifth grade living in Puerto Rico, my friends and I collected baseball cards each with a unique number on the back of the card. We would shuffle our cards, split them and hold half in one hand and half in the other picture side up and present the two stacks to a friend. He would make a bet of the number of cards he would take from or give to me based on whether he had chosen the part of my card deck with the highest number showing on the bottom card in that hand. Each of us had our streak of luck where we would clean out our friends. As you grow older you never stop being a kid.

October 13, 2005 – Munich in November

October 13, 2005 – Munich in November

It’s November 3rd 1990 at 9:15 AM on a Saturday morning. I’m outbound on American Airlines flight 278 in aisle seat 28C en route to Chicago Ohare, an intermediate stop before my final destination in Munich. Ohare is one of the great airports in this country in my opinion. Centrally located in the U.S., it also affords the perfect jumping off place for international flights over the pole to Europe or Asia. I was a card carrying member of AA’s Admiral’s Club and had become a regular visitor to the one located at the fork in the “Y” that Concourse H and K forms in Terminal 3. You enter the club through frosted glass sliding doors, take an elevator up one floor, and check into the reception desk on your right as you leave the foyer formed by the opposing banks of elevators each bank with two elevators. Weary travelers trailing wheeled black boxed shaped carry-ons, or like me, lugging a hanging soft-sided wardrobe folded in half and slung over my shoulder: two suits, jogging sweats, six dress shirts, six ties, dress shoes, and enough sox and underwear to last a full week. After displaying your club card you can stand in line to get seat assignments or make itinerary changes, or like me, already checked in with an assigned seat through my destination, hang up the garment bag and find a seat to rest the two hours before the next leg of my flight. We had landed at 3.34 PM Central Standard Time.

The dark wood paneled club is a collection of separate seating areas. Across from the reception desk on the left is the large luggage storeroom and beyond is a walkway that opens into a seating area after a short walk. On either side of the walkway are other seating areas that form an upside down “U” enclosing the hallway, reception area, and elevator banks. To the right are cubicles with computer and phone hookups: good place to check e-mails—back then we were all on CompuServe—and make phone calls. In front and to the left are seating areas separated by short dividers or low couches. At the bottom of the upside down “U” on the left is a bar. In front of that is a seating area surrounding a big screen television running CNN non-stop. I had a phone card back then and could speed dial the long distance number and key in my card number in no time. On a Saturday afternoon, the only call I made was to my wife IM to let her know I was enjoying the club’s amenities: “the flight was on time… Nothing unusual happened en route... I had the cereal choice for breakfast on board... It will be late at night when I land so I’ll call when you wake up on Sunday and tell you what Germany is like…xo xo.” I pass on CNN and a drink at the bar, choosing instead to finish the book I had begun on the plane. I forget the title of the book, though it was probably a Sara Paretsky, V.I. Warshawski novel—I was big into her back then.

It’s 5:45 PM and I’m strapped into seat 37H on American Airlines flight 110 outbound for Munich, a wide body DC10, the air conditioning blowing full blast as we push back from the gate and head out onto the taxiway. I can’t remember the number of times, I had been strapped into a plane on the taxiway of Ohare Airport. Each time I get the same feeling, expectation if I’m on an outbound flight, and anxiousness on inbound flights heading home. Today’s journey is new and I’m full of expectation. This will be my first time ever in Germany. My other European sojourns were to countries all around Deutschland. A part of me was coming home: my father’s father was a German immigrant, thus making me a quarter German. I had begun to study the language in an attempt to learn appropriate greetings and to be polite. Taking off into an evening sun, it wasn’t long before dinner service was completed and the cabin was darkened for the video entertainment, which I chose to ignore hoping to catch some sleep during the 10-hour flight.

At 10:00 AM, Sunday morning November 4, 1990, flight 110 touched down at the old Munich Airport at Messestadt-Riem on the eastern extreme of the Munich metropolitan area about 7 km from the city center, where I was staying. I’m in Munich to attend one of the largest electronics trade shows in Europe, Electronica. The four-day event fills the old Munich Trade Fair Center with several thousand exhibitors—from the great to the small—of everything electronic from all over the continent, each hoping to impress some of the over 100,000 who will attend the event this year. The Cleveland-based publishing company I work for has sent me to cover the conference along with two vice president JA and JZ as well as the sales manager and publisher for the magazine, JF and JU, respectively. I have the advantage of having our Munich-based bureau editor JG, who will help me spend my time effectively while here.

I take a cab to the Intercity Hotel at Bahnohofsplatz 2 in Munich City Center right at the Hauptbahnhof (main train station). The Intercity is your 3-star or less hotel that visitors like us who wait until the last minute to reserve get when a major event fills the city’s sleeping rooms. Originally, everyone was supposed to stay at this hotel thanks to our travel agent, who had no other options. However, I received a call from JG telling me that the Intercity was not a fit place for company executives. I asked JG if he could impose on his marketing communications contacts at Siemens to see if they may have a spare room at one of their hotels that could accommodate our two VPs from Cleveland. JG was able to acquire two rooms from Siemens at the five-start Penta Hotel (now part of the Marriott Renaissance Hotel Chain). They would not know that there had been a snafu. We simply gave them their hotel accommodations and they told the cab driver to take them there from the airport. Executives are like modern-day children; they seem to get everything they expect and complain when it’s not so. When they check in at the front desk, the clerk smiles politely and asks them in perfect English for their names and the length of their stay. I on the other hand have to use my atrocious German picked up from the Berlitz German Cassette Pack during October and the accompanying phrase book to go through the process. My clerk was non-committal and allowed me to make my best effort before she would question me first in German then in English that resembled my German. Thus we were able to get through the registration process and happily no one was behind me waiting to register.

As soon as I arrive in my room on the third or fourth floor of the hotel, I call JG who I invite to dinner Sunday evening suggesting he should bring his wife along. She wisely chooses not to come—IM demurs to these invitations as well complaining the conversation will be shoptalk all evening and she’s right of course. After the call, I crawl into my jogging sweats and take a 45-minute run hoping it will either let me sleep for a hour or two or keep me awake until my dinner with JG—he’s coming to the hotel and will ring my room when he arrives. JG is of my father’s generation. Their view of the world was shaped by the Great War and of the discipline that has demanded to wage it on both sides. My father served as an enlisted man ultimately reaching the rank of staff sergeant. Enlisted men lived in one world and officers in another. The former had the responsibility to direct the war, the latter simply carried out the direction. As magazine editor I was analogous to the staff sergeant in the Army. With no direct responsibility for generating income, my staff and I were overhead—SG&A in the vernacular of the finance world.

My first run in Munich was out the front door of the Intercity Hotel a right turn onto Bayerstrasse, which parallels one of the train tracks heading out of the Hauptbahnhof. The first part of the run is along a sidewalk that on a weekday would be crowded with shoppers for the 20th century storefronts—to distinguish them from those in the city center predating the 20th century—along the sidewalk. Three-quarters of a mile into the run, Bayerstrasse turns into Landsberger Strasse and the urban gives way to the suburban: car dealerships, light industry, a lumberyard—the smell of wood a welcome alternative to carbon monoxide. Just over two miles out I turn around and retrace my route. After getting a shower I feel purged of the travel karma, though my biological clock is still keeping California time. I forego lunch and instead begin a walking tour of the old city center which is located left of the hotel entrance on Bayerstrasse. You walk through an arched gate, the Karlstor (Karl’s gate), that resembles the Arc de Triomphe in shape, sans the ornate relief art, with each tower abutting buildings a couple of hundred years old on either side. In front of the Karlstor is the Karlsplatz, but often referred to as Stachus. Karlplatz is named for Elector Karl Theodor, who had the square laid out in 1791. It’s a expansive circular pedestrian area with large circular water fountain in the center with flattop rounded stones for seating. Being November it was brisk outside, but it didn’t deter anyone. Karlsplatz was teaming with tourist as I wandered about, the sound of German being accommpanied by French, English, and other languages as I walked among the crowd.

JG arrived at around 7:00 PM that evening and rang my room. He said he would meet me in the bar, where I found him ministering to a mug of draft beer. We had not seen each other in over eight years, when he had come to New York for an editors gathering when the magazine was owned by McGraw-Hill. I joined him at the bar and ordered a glass of red wine and we caught up on all the gossip about friends now retired or working part time, how the industry was doing in Germany, the politics affecting the country. We also caught up on magazine business that we had been discussing in e-mails. Finally, after we’d finished our drinks, he announced that we were going to a nice restaurant a short walk from the hotel. Jet lagged as I was, I managed to make it through dinner and several rounds of drinks before retiring for the night, JG promising to meet me in the morning at the hotel and from there we would go to the fairgrounds. Before we parted for the evening, JG asked if I would like to see Neuschwanstein Castle on Friday after the conference. I gladly accepted unaware that he meant Bavarian King Ludwig II famous “fairy tale” structure built between 1869 and 1886 that Americans know as the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle in Disneyland.

Munich has been in the business of hosting trade fairs for over 1000 yeas. In 1158, German King and Roman Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) granted Henry the Lion, the founder of Munich, the right to mint coins as well as a charter to begin a market. Up until the 20th Century, fairs were held throughout the city. Then in 1908, Munich established a dedicated fairground at Theresienhoehe, just over a kilometer from the Haupfbahnhof, a matter of a few minutes by the U-Bahn that JG hauled me aboard early Monday morning. The underground was beginning to crowd with other early risers on their way to the fair. The grounds are huge comprising 47 hectares of land, with 25 to 30 individual exhibit halls, built around Bavariapark, a tree-filled rhombus shaped plot of green large enough to take some part of a half hour to walk all way round. Exhibit halls lock the park in on all sides save the entrance on the west—the longest side of the rhombus.

Trade fairs all resemble one another with exhibit booths from the sublime 10-by-10-foot cube—the standard exhibit element permitted in the halls—to the ridiculously large—an elaborate storefront with conference rooms and exhibits upstairs and downstairs enclosing refreshment areas serving beer, wine, soft drinks and all manner of foods. Some of the booths feature attractive women all hawking the wares of the vendor she’s representing. Others offer elaborate giveaways for taking time to listen to a marketing pitch. No matter what language is being spoken, the message is the same, “buy my wares!” The secret of a great conference’s success—Electronica is certainly one of the greats—is to provide sufficient rationale for companies to pay for its employees to travel to the conference to see what might be available to purchase—from plastic knobs to million-dollar pieces of production equipment.

Editors at these events are there to search out the latest product offerings while having a good time at the expense of the exhibiting companies. JG and I had a full calendar jumping from an interview in one hospitality suite to another. The appointments began at 8:00 AM and were every hour on the hour with a two hour break for lunch, ending at 6:00 PM. The evenings we were invited but not obliged to attend parties at Munich’s many posh hotels. JG begged off an evening of entertaining to spend a quiet evening at home with his family. I didn’t blame him. My Monday evening would be in the service of the magazine’s sales manager. He had been trying to get a meeting with the VP of Marketing Communications, CV, at a large European semiconductor company, who I had a relationship with. During a meeting earlier, I asked CV if he would be the magazine’s guest for dinner at the Terrassen restaurant in the Konigshof Hotel. He asked if he could bring his director of marcom, MP whom I also knew and I said of course she was invited as well as anyone else he wished to bring along.

The sales manager JF was well please to have both these advertising buyers to himself for the evening. I warned him that the reason they accepted our invitation was that I promised we wouldn’t discuss any advertising business. JF accepted the condition, taking the opportunity to build a relationship. It was a great evening with JF being the gracious host asking first about the company’s business, how the market was looking for next year, as well as the long term outlook for the industry in general. The answers to his questions were the bleak story I had already heard of an industry in recession with no immediate sign of a recovery. After we had had our fill of dismal business news, we began exchanging stories of families and the upcoming holidays. CV and MP are both Italian and I had known them for several years. Based near Milan with another office near Geneva, they both spend too much time on planes between these two offices as well as the company’s many far flung facilities in the U.S., Japan, and Asia. The official language of the company is English to accommodate all the many different operations, but the Italian CEO, a legend in the Industry, speaks English, French, his native Italian, as well as German—a renaissance man in many ways—as do many of the other corporate executives.

There is an interesting dynamic occurring between the four of us at the table over dinner, largely because in the past, it wasn’t the done thing to have editor and sales manager speaking with a potential magazine advertiser at the same time. Publisher and editor were acceptable since the publisher would not ask for business in the presence of an editor. It would be awkward for the customer since a refusal might diminish him in the eyes of the editor who impartiality would be affected. Though I assured both of them that no business would be discussed, I suspect both still felt awkward and reserved with JF in case the conversation would drift into the realm of future advertising possibility. It was a turning point for me as well. I had become that concerned about the future of the magazine, which was suffering dreadfully from a marked decline in advertising support, and its ability to maintain the already diminished staff we had still working. We had already had one major round of layoffs. I felt I could compromise my editorial integrity in the mind of our guests a bit if it might result in improving the magazine’s prospect for survival.

JF and I had a more dinners over the two remaining days of the conference. All were similar in nature to the one we had with CV and MP. Everyone was in the same boat, an industry in recession and dramatic reduction in spending on advertising. Such cutbacks had less impact on immediate business in contrast to something such as spending lavishly to attend Electronica. The logic was hard to refute since a single order from a major customer that resulted from participation in the exhibition would easily justify the cost.

By Friday, I was happy to be rid of my duties as Judas goat and both depressed at having to assume the role and disappointed that the sacrifice appeared to have been for naught. I was very happy to see JG pull up in his Volkswagen hatchback as I waited in front of the Intercity Hotel eager to be away from the hustle and bustle of Munich. It was close to 10:00 AM when we began the 128-kilometer drive (nearly 100 miles) south west to Neuschwanstein Castle. As soon as we got near, I recognized the structure as would just about any other American, an immediately recognizable icon. The lush green, forested mountains surrounding the structure gave it a reality that the Anaheim imitation could not conjure—yet both were attempts to bring a fantasy to life. King Ludwig II was trying to bring the world of Wagner’s opera into being; Walt Disney the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

The visit to Neuschwanstein Castle was the appropriate ending to a week of 12- to 15-hour days filled with continuous stimulation, with little time to concentrate on any one thought for more than a moment at a time. Following the tour through the castle—a small group as we were well into the off season and it was cold outside—I was able to see inside King Ludwig’s imagination. He left a clear picture of it in stone. The castle had survived its creator and continues to be preserved by the countless numbers of visitors who, like me, come to marvel and contribute to its upkeep and maintenance. I envied Ludwig his creation. It had become part of the human psyche.

JG and I had early dinner that evening at a restaurant near my hotel in Munich after the drive back. I thanked him, turned in early, and got up early Saturday for the flight back home, through Chicago arriving back in San Jose early evening.

October 3, 2005 – The Tentative Newborn

October 3, 2005 – The Tentative Newborn

When our youngest daughter RD decided to start a family, we were a couple of years into the new millennium. She was influenced by discussions around her workplace—she worked for a homebuilder in Southern California—about a woman’s ticking biological clock: tick tick tick tick…the sound of the 60 minutes stop watch droning on. She was also no doubt influenced by her older sister, ME, having her second baby, an adorable bald baby boy—MJ, with pouting lips and obsidian eyes—they've since become very dark chocolate in color. There is nothing like a newborn baby with its innocence and total dependence to bring out the material instincts in women. Thus, it was no surprise when RD announced she was pregnant and would deliver in late November or early December of 2002. As with all our grandchildren, my wife IM and I attended the ultrasound and acquired our first photo of the newest member of our extended family, a lovely little granddaughter slowly beginning to assert herself as she waited to enter her world.

At that time RD and her husband TF lived in San Clemente off the Camino del Estrella exit from Interstate 5, The San Diego Freeway. She was then driving a white Mustang convertible, ideal for a “dink” (double income, no kids) hardly the appropriate conveyance for a mommy, a fact that IM mentioned whenever we visited—the Mustang became a GM Envoy. In November, plump with her expectant bundle, RD and husband TF hosted the entire clan at their house for Thanksgiving dinner. RD’s place was filled with the sound of ME, her husband GS, and our grand daughter EM and now fully mobile grandson MJ. Also joining the festivities were TF’s daughters from his first marriage, RC and RK. TF was manhandling the turkey and juggling side dishes, filling the house with the smells of dinner preparation. The adults were caught up in conversation. The older girls were watching a video and the younger children were playing with toys. We had taken the kids to a park a short walk from the RD’s place where we played basketball and roughhoused on the expansive lawn, part of a small putting green, next to the park’s basketball court until everyone had grown tired and hungry. They were now waiting for the feast to begin; making it known they were hungry ever so often.

This Thanksgiving was one, which we had someone new to be thankful for, and RD was carrying the guest of honor: a thanksgiving prayer followed by a champagne toast. RD had to toast with the soft drink the kids raised in honor of the occasion. Once dinner began everyone stuffed themselves except poor RD who now, close to her due date—the baby could come at any moment—managed the smallest portions of turkey and side dishes. Everyone kept a watchful eye on her as she had begun to experience early labor pains. When the feast was finished we drove down to Pines Park, which sits atop a cliff on Camino Capistrano after a right turn from westbound Camino del Estrella. The neighborhood around the park is a collection of expensive single- and multi-level homes, a great many on the western side of Camino Capistrano with full ocean views. The park is a little over a block long and about half again as wide stretching from the street to the cliff edge. Below the five- or six-story tall cliff is the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1). Across the PCH are railroad tracks and Doheny Beach beyond. On a sunny day like today, the beach is crowded with beach goers—lots of RVs filling the parking lot, and the grayish sand full of picnickers—the ocean a bit too chilly for swimming. A crowded beach in November is why we all choose to live in California

Arriving at the park we could see the blue Pacific extending all the way to the horizon—the fog held at bay—as the sun, now hanging low in the western sky hurried on its way to Asia. We crawl out of the two cars we had driven down to the park from RD’s place. The kids would work their dinner off on the swings, slides, and stationary riding animals mounted on large springs in the sandlot located in a depression amid the expansive lush green lawn of the park. Meanwhile, we would walk RD up and down the sidewalk around the playground. The old wives tale goes that exercise at the onset of contractions will hasten labor. While the kids played, watched over by the men, ME and IM walked RD around the concrete sidewalk at the park’s border with Camino Capistrano. The sidewalk slopes down and along the front of the sandlot and a spur runs down to the playground and doubles back along the sandlot’s edge, cuts a concrete path in the grass of the park, and returns on itself up the grade: the sidewalk and spur forming a huge “D” when viewed from above.

After over 45 minutes of walking and resting, RD’s pains turned out to be false labor and went away of their own accord. With the kids played out and bored, we all returned to RD’s place for desert. The evening came to an end with ME and her gang and IM and me returning to the Fairfield Inn off the Oso Parkway from Interstate 5 about 12 miles from RD’s place.

ME and her guys—who were planning to stay for the delivery, which we all felt would happen Friday the 29th or Saturday the 30th—spent the next two days visiting GS’s family in Costa Mesa, while IM and I went shopping after checking on RD, who had nothing to report the morning of the 29th or 30th, except that she wanted to begin some real labor—the anticipation was like sitting on pins and needles. IM and I spent Friday evening and the most of Saturday with RD, returning to the Fairfield Inn in the late afternoon. By the end of the day on Saturday, RD’s contractions had begun again as we learned from TF’s phone call from the Irvine Medical Center where RD was resting. Irvine Medical Center is located off Interstate 405 on the right hand side of Sand Canyon Avenue, just beyond the Sand Canyon-Alton Parkway intersection. You can see the multi-story hospital as you make the exit. When IM and I arrived just before sundown, we found RD resting in her room at the hospital and TF walking about her bed.

TF said he had called the doctor when RD had begun to experience painful contractions. IM and I each gave her a kiss, looking into her expectant mother’s eyes to make sure she was all right. Shortly after we arrived a nurse came in to check on the progress of the contractions with an instrument that measures the intensity of contractions and to examine her to determine how far along RD’s labor had progressed. We left the room to allow the nurse to do her job and found the hospital waiting room on the second floor not far from RD’s room. Here we waited for close to an hour. During that time IM sat quietly watching the evening news—we were the only ones waiting—and I paced nervously about unable to sit still. If I had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, I would look like the prototypical 1950’s father.

Irvine Medical Center sits on a piece of what was once the Irvine Ranch, a vast open stretch of ranch land that once rushed unobstructed toward the Pacific, its way being block by the coast mountain range just before reaching Laguna Beach on the other side. The hospital sits between Interstate 405 on the west and Interstate 5 on the east—the two freeways rushing toward a confluence, the natives simply call the “Y.” Beyond the Y Interstate 5 alone carries traffic south to San Diego. From the window outside the waiting room, I could see the mountains hiding the Pacific just beyond. I could see the neat squares of multifamily housing developments that surround the hospital and encroach on the nearby 405 Freeway. At the foot of the mountains I could see a new development of multifamily homes under construction. The company RD worked for was one of several builders colonizing the mountain base, covering over James Irvine’s fertile soil with concrete, asphalt, and housing-association-maintained manicured greenbelts.

When we returned to RD’s room, we found her dressed and ready to leave. Her doctor’s examination and the result of the nurse’s testing had determined that the baby was nowhere near ready to be born and RD was sent home for the evening. We telephone ME and let her know the baby wasn’t coming tonight. She and her gang had to leave on Sunday to return home up north to prepare for work on Monday. I had taken Monday and Tuesday off. Sunday morning we said goodbye to ME and her guys. We spent all of Sunday with RD. That morning TF drove his two daughters back. It was one of those days when we described all we could remember of ME’s and RD’s birth to reassure our expectant mother everything was proceeding according to plan. The other family member making input by phone was my sister DD, a nurse working in a suburb of Boston for a Russian doctor offering holistic alternatives as well as conventional medicine to his patients. DD is into holistic healing, but was once a delivery room nurse with countless numbers of deliveries to her name. It’s safe to say, she’s seen nearly every conceivable way a newborn can make its way into the world. When something was a concern, RD would call her aunt for reassurance, which was always forthcoming. DD was the long distance coach for both ME and RD.

As the day progressed, the contractions picked up in frequency reaching a point and a pain threshold—one or two reaching a pain threshold that pushed RD to the limit—that suggested the onset of labor. But as soon as the contractions reached an almost unbearable threshold, they would subside away to the discomforting false labor of before. This building up and letting down continued throughout the day. By early evening after TF returned the contractions were coming steady and gaining in intensity and we decided it was time to return to the hospital. This time the baby was on its way. Once RD was back in the same room and bed she had occupied the day before, the nurse came in and attached the monitor to record her contractions on a roll of continuous fed, red graph plotter paper. As we stood by her bedside, IM and I could see in the grimace that would sweep across RD’s face at the peak of a contraction. Now, there was no let up, the wave were consistent and growing in intensity. A while later the nurse returned and said she was going to examine RD and we went to the waiting room. The nurse came out to tell us that RD was still in the early stages of labor and it would be some time before she was ready to deliver. She suggested we go home and get some rest and return later that night.

After returning to RD’s room to check on her progress, IM and I did leave the hospital and headed to RD’s house where we were planning to spend the night after having checked out of the Fairfield Inn earlier in the day. No sooner had we arrived than my cell phone rang. It was TF saying that RD’s doctor had ordered an ultrasound to ensure the baby was in the classic head down position. The ultrasound showed that baby AF had somehow managed to flip into a heads up position and now RD was being prepared for a caesarian section. I said we were on our way. Before he hung up, he asked IM if she could find his cross and bring it to the hospital. IM located it and we were on our way back to the hospital. As we neared the Sand Canyon Road exit, the new Russell Watson CD I had brought IM before Thanksgiving began playing on the car radio. The lyrics of the song he was singing “Va' pensiero” were particularly meaningful to the two of us as we were expectantly rushing to meet the newest addition to our extended family for the first time.

When we arrived TF and RD were both in the delivery room. A short time later, the doctor came into the waiting room to tell us the C-section was complete and that the baby and mom were fine. RD was being sewn back up and our new grand daughter AF was in the nursery being probed and prodded far more than she wished. Shortly after the doctor spoke with us, TF came out to say AF and RD were both in the recovery room and we could come in to see our new grandbaby. We followed him back and found an exhausted new mother, fighting off the effects of the drugs she’d received during surgery, her long thin fingers shaking slightly. She was smiling and watching as the nurse finished her work on baby AF, who was not crying but had a look on her face that suggested she was not amused by these goings on. A half hour later, the nurse finally handed AF to her mom and we watched as the two got to know one another. Eventually, IM and I got to cuddle the little swaddled newborn with her pink knit hat atop her head to keep her warm. Holding a new life just come into the world makes you aware that a part of us will carry on—the gene pool preserved for another generation; your line and by proxy you carrying on.