Chapter 31

In the process of regaining closeness with Brenda, Emily, and Shirley, I didn't make the mistake of not paying adequate attention to my relationship with Joyce. She was still the anchor that kept me from going too far away from where I needed to be.

The time we spent alone together was always loving and personally fulfilling, but we also managed to talk about important things and make our time together productive. I depended on Joyce to point me in the direction where my presence was most required, and where it would do the most good.

Business information came to me mostly from Joyce, but I still made it a practice to speak with my Dad at least three or four times a week. We were seeing a lot of Mama as well, because she was coming down to Lawrence to bring us design changes for the nursery wing extensions.

The addition being added to Uncle Bunny's house was almost completed, in spite of the fact that both Mama and Joyce had continued adding new features and additional size to the original plans they had submitted to the builder. One such added feature was a back staircase, and three self contained apartments in the downstairs portion of the new children's wing. This made it possible for Mama to increase the size of the upstairs nursery, which she had come to believe was too crowded.

On the first weekend after school recessed for the summer, Shirley and I went off for a romantic weekend at a cabin overlooking a beautiful lake up in Wisconsin. We spent the whole weekend talking, making love, and walking together on narrow pathways that wound themselves throughout the densely wooded area surrounding the lake shore. By the time we were due to return to Ridgeline, both Shirley and I had regained the previous level of comfort we'd managed as youngsters, back when we had first gone together. It was a deeper, richer, closeness now, because we had many more shared interests than before.

One by one, each of my wives went away with me for two or three nights of one on one intimacy. Brenda and I went to New York City, attending a Broadway play, and shopping at some of the better stores that Brenda had always wanted to visit. Most of her purchases ended up being gifts for her sister wives, the nursery girls, Phil, Claire, Thelma and all the children. At Brenda's insistence, Frank Clooney had gotten her several charge cards that were tied into her bank and investment accounts. She insisted on paying for whatever she purchased. It was something she wanted to do to celebrate her financial success.

Dad and Mama decided to make a trip to Europe for three weeks, in early July. They spent a week in the south of France, a week in Italy, and three days each, in Germany and England. Gerta and Hans accompanied them on the trip, and were very surprised and impressed with what they saw in Germany. Impressed or not, it was after this trip that Hans quit comparing everything American, unfavorably, with what was available from Germany. In conversation after, Hans began making a distinction between American Germans, and Germans from Germany. He was more impressed with the expatriate Germans.

During the European trip, my father and Hans got into a discussion concerning my success with grain investing, and, as a result, right after all of them returned, Gerta and Hans asked me if I would handle an investment account for them. They ended up funding the account with two hundred thousand dollars. I usually spent several early mornings a week, during the summer, over in the kitchen talking with Hans and Gerta, keeping them up to date on the comings and goings within our branch of the family.

Hans liked the dirt, and Gerta wanted news about each of the children. I would usually bring over a weekly summary of their account activity, and the three of us would go over it in some detail. I knew the money wasn't that important to them, but being included, as part of the family was.

Mama had both April and Dwightee over for day trips, with occasional sleep over's by April. I was sure that the sleep over's would include Dwight as soon as he became less dependant on Joyce for his nourishment. Mama and Gerta both spent a lot of time with all the other children too, but it was clear that Brenda's two babies were her favorites. Brenda loved this, and none of the other girls ever seemed troubled by Mama's obvious favoritism.

Hans and my father seemed to prefer Derek and Bunny. Accompanied by Irma and Helen one day, Dad and Hans took the boys over to Bolling, for a morning's visit to the petting zoo, lunch at Gracerie's, and part of an afternoon at the company offices. Dad introduced the boys as future owners of the company, to all of the staff he could find who weren't too busy to avoid meeting them. This meet and greet tour extended all over the building. Derek liked the fresh baked bread.

In August, Gold and Silver diverged from all the grains. It lasted for a full week, again on some kind of a news scare that had people seeking a safe storehouse of value during a time of political uncertainty.

This time, I was fully prepared to exploit the disparity in prices. I traded huge grain quantities for the entire week, more than four times my normal trading limits. I took full advantage of momentary imbalances in spot, near contracts and forward contract months, arbitraging each of them against both the metals and the time differences. Since silver hadn't risen as much as gold had, I sold additional gold against silver, expecting the price difference to slide back closer to the normal ratios.

I remained almost totally closeted in my office at home, trading the metals in several world markets, and buying and selling grains in Asia and Europe as well as at home. I ate on the run, and ignored attempts from all the women, attempts that were designed to get me to take it easier, and get more rest. By then, I knew how rare these price divergences were, and I knew, without question, that these opportunities couldn't exist for any length of time. The global markets were getting so much better integrated, and the computer programs were already setting up to exploit any price variances from market to market. I wanted to profit while there was still an opportunity to do so.

Working eighteen and twenty hour days, I managed to make more than seven million dollars in trading profits, spread out over a six day period. When the metals came back to price parity with both the grains and the Dollar, I was scrambling to cover all of my open grain positions. I was happy that everything had gone so closely to the hypothetical model I'd projected from my earlier thoughts given to gaming out possible divergence scenarios. I had been anticipating the effect certain occurrences would have on all the investment vehicles I'd placed within my area of special interest. This time, it had been a classic case of unjustified panic, and flight to what were traditionally considered safe havens, in times of political or financial turmoil.

It was so easy to accomplish the same thing by trading on the Forex markets. I decided that I would keep a close eye on the metals in the future, selling on any panic buying, and hedging with currency futures in all the most stable world currencies. Gold and silver had limited potential as safe havens in the current world situation, one where electronic switching from one currency to another took only a matter of seconds. It cost money to store gold or silver, but transferring the equivalents in currency cost just a small fraction of that total.

Later that first evening, on the day I closed out my metal trading, when I informed Brenda that her account had increased in value by more than half a million dollars, all of my wives finally understood why I had worked so diligently for the past week.

Even Emily, who seemed to care less than my other wives, about money, got excited when I informed her that the charitable trusts had made sufficient new, uncommitted, profits, to hire a crew of workers to begin the food distribution program in Lawrence and Kansas City.

I already had plenty of money, certainly enough to commence operating the program earlier, but my telling her that the week's trading profits alone would finance the funding of the program for more than a year, made her realize that my trading was much more than a hobby I just dabbled in for my own amusement. Lives were being changed with the proceeds of my trading.

Joyce had always supported my trading. Right from the first, she had realized that it had the potential to make a lot of money for the group home program. More than that, she recognized that earning my own way was an important part of me starting to believe more in myself. It was something I had done on my own, creating my own source of revenue. It gave me a new sense of independence, and confidence in my future. Inherited money was one thing, but money you had earned, that inspired positive feelings about your competence and place in your society. I became more independent when I began to believe I could manage to earn a good return on my inheritance.

While my parents were in Europe, Joyce took over the day to day management functions. I became the front man for her. I returned calls in my father's absence, and met with sales and support staff to listen to their reports and requests. I sat in Dad's office, trading, and Joyce ran everything from down in her own office, with support from Ellen, and my other wives.

All during the two weeks my Dad was gone, nothing of any real importance came up that required immediate action or decision taking. Joyce did initiate some changes, but these were mostly protocol and internal communication changes that had more to do with utilizing available computer capabilities and modernizing the company memoranda system.

My father mistrusted computers, much the same as most older management types did. Joyce embraced all technological changes, and wanted to implement anything she believed capable of increasing either our efficiency or effectiveness. By the time my father returned, his office computer was set up in a way that made it capable of communicating directly with key managers from all the various departments in all of our companies.

For the first month after he returned, he drove division leaders and department heads crazy with his constant sending out of computer to computer memos, all seemingly requiring immediate responses.

One of the positive results of this new communication availability, was that it caused managers to assign someone from their department, usually their brightest people, to handle these communications with my father.

Because my father was exposed to all these new, young and talented, people assigned to handle his requests and questions, three new potential brain trust members were identified, and later, transferred over to the Bolling offices. Two of them became founding brain trust members. The third potential member ended up marrying a local doctor, then quitting to have children, before the actual forming of a true brain trust.

My father had a good eye for judging employee potential. Unlike me, he preferred to move slowly, incrementally increasing each individual's responsibilities, as they passed challenges he set for them. He was also more patient when it came to evaluating potential. This allowed him to discover other strengths that either Joyce or I might have overlooked, or missed entirely. He looked for natural talent, feeling like most of the day to day skill sets could be taught over time.

In November of 1990, two months after we had all returned for our senior year at KU, Joyce uncovered our first, genuine, male brain trust candidate.

His name was Michael Sparkman, he was nineteen years old, and already in his senior year at the university. Joyce became acquainted with him when Natalie, Joyce's personal nursery care assistant, turned up pregnant, and named Mr. Sparkman as the presumptive father of the baby.

I say presumptive, because she did hedge her identification by mentioning that one other boy might, possibly, deserve to be included as the potential father also. Since Joyce had discovered that he went to KU also, she took it upon herself to locate him, and make him aware of Natalie's predicament.

While Joyce was finding Michael, Natalie located a clinic that was willing to perform an abortion on her. Joyce didn't know that Natalie had already decided to abort the baby when she went to speak with Natalie's boyfriend. It was all a comedy of errors, compounded needlessly by Natalie's lack of communication about her decision.