Chapter 33

By the time summer had ended, Dale and Eddie were both being accepted as new members of our family. Not as sister wives to the others, but as some kind of kissing cousins. It was a slow process, this acceptance, and was made possible only because the sisters worked hard at finding ways to ingratiate themselves with all my wives.

For Eddie, this came easily. She was very flexible in her opinions and beliefs, and willing, always, to cast her lot with whatever the majority was favoring. She wasn't easy to persuade, she just was able to manage to enjoy whatever choices currently favored by the majority. She had fun no matter what was decided.

Dale was different, always being quiet, but holding those strong opinions of hers. She too, was a person who always felt the need to be constantly drawing lines and daring people to cross over them. Lines to protect her sense of fairness, her need for privacy, and whatever territory she had marked out for herself. She was a lot like Emily in that way, able to resist pressure from anyone, and willing to argue her side of an issue well past the point of reasonableness.

She managed to overcome all these uncooperative traits, by simply overwhelming everyone with her competence and helpfulness in every area where she wasn't busy already, drawing one of her invisible lines to protect herself.

As an example, she and Emily were constantly arguing over virtually everything. Even while they argued over something they both knew they would never reach agreement on, or sway each other's opinions about, Dale would be engaged in something, separate from the area of contention, something that was directly benefiting Emily.

Dale was an accomplished seamstress, hair stylist, makeup artist, and dietician. When Emily's face started breaking out, it was Dale who helped her with her complexion. She showed Emily how to fix her hair in a way that all of us found better suited to her, and much more attractive. Dale could be a real pain in the ass, but she compensated for that by being so good to us in other ways.

For Joyce, Dale was an immediate problem solving resource, someone she could bounce her ideas off of, to find any initial weaknesses that needed to be improved upon. Joyce had the added advantage of being a desirable sex partner to Dale

Dale seemed to understand, intuitively, the best path to acceptance with each of my wives, even while still maintaining that she had no interest in having sex with any of them. By the end of the summer, only Eddie, Joyce, and I were still having sex with Dale. It wasn't something that anyone had agreed to, just something that had naturally resulted.

Eddie became more like Joyce, as far as her sexual habits went, making the rounds from room to room, always being welcomed, wherever she decided to stop.

Ellen had come over to our house on a few occasions, after work, or on weekends, and when she did, Dale stayed off by herself, away from the group.

Michael Sparkman acted surprised when Joyce and I took him out to dinner in late August, presenting him with our formal proposal for him permanently joining our brain trust. At first, he demurred, saying that he already had a chosen career path, but Joyce began talking to him about the many quality of life differences between what he was aiming towards, and what we were offering to him.

He hadn't known the scope of our other, non-business interests and activities, and was very interested in learning about the group homes, and the food distribution programs. The key to his decision to accept our offer came after Joyce mentioned to him that he too could bring us his own ideas for other charitable projects that he might have some personal interest in seeing implemented.

It turned out that Michael had an avid interest in bringing musical training to children living on several Native American reservations located in the Midwest. As a child, and later, through his high school years, Michael had been a volunteer music tutor, affiliated with a program that had been disbanded due to a lack of funding, and a lack of interest, after the program's original founder had passed away a few years previously.

The program itself began in a rather small way, and was very inexpensive for us to implement. The two greatest expenses being the cost of instruments, and the travel costs for transporting the reservation tutors.

What had seemed to me to be most difficult hurdle, was the task of locating sufficient volunteers to make the program workable. Michael insisted that he knew plenty of young people who would volunteer, if such a program were reinstated.

We gave him the go ahead to immediately set everything up, including all the funding he said he thought might be required. He left us for three weeks, to head back to Topeka to put the old tutoring program back together. After setting it up, he usually spent his weekends at one reservation or another, managing things, making certain that the program was having his intended results. It was a modest program in the beginning, but like most things, it was well received by the children who benefited from it, and, because of this, it started to grow and expand. With his love of music, Michael had the passion to see the program succeed.

To me, the biggest advantage of the brain trust concept was that it left all of us with the free time to pursue our own, personal, interests. The main thing any of us contributed to the business, was our thoughts, and they weren't on any set clock or schedule.

All of us would work on several problems at once, giving them thought, and discussing what we'd managed to come up with, among all the interested other members of the company, and with the other brain trust members.

At first, my father maintained something of an attitude of reserved skepticism, concerned about the looseness of our problem solving methods and techniques. Joyce had become the coordinator for our initial group of five.

She would usually be the one to speak with my father, although he would sometimes seek me out, or call me, to discuss something he thought I'd handle better than Joyce would. Sometimes, he'd go out of his way to talk things over with both Eddie and Dale at work.

When he approached any of us, he usually would give that person four or five sheets of notes he'd made, outlining the situation, identifying the problem, and explaining what ideas he'd thought of, including why he had been forced to set those ideas aside.

Whatever notes he gave us were first copied, and then distributed to all the participants involved. Whatever anyone came up with, including questions needing to be researched, and, later, to be answered, would be given over to Joyce, to be discussed later on, among the group, and, if necessary, reassigned for more thought and study.

Many times, it was a fairly routine and simple problem we would be given, something requiring only a day or two of thought from us, before a consensus was reached on how best to solve it.

Sometimes though, it would be a complex series of choices that my father faced, each with benefits, risks, or costs. These were the ones where there wasn't any clear answer to determine which choice would be best.

Often, while there was no one clear choice, the answer we ended up choosing as the best solution, was one which incorporated combining two or more of the choices together, to balance the risk reward ratio much more in our favor.

My father would always take our reports, spending time by studying them alone, reading carefully any answer we had come up with. Almost always, he would return our report with a list of more new questions, indicating areas where he wanted either, more thought from us, or greater clarification of what we'd meant or proposed.

All of us in the brain trust learned a lot from those times when my father remained either, unsatisfied with our answers, or else unconvinced that what we had come up with answered all the questions he felt necessary to have answered before making the best possible decision. There were a lot of time like that, and we learned more about the factors he believed important to consider when making a decision.

These were also frustrating experiences for us, because we tried never to send him anything, until and unless, we were all in reasonable agreement that this was the best we could come up with.

What this taught us, right from the beginning, was that what we originally sent him hadn't really been our best, and that my father had a better understanding of the overall picture than we did.

Joyce and I both thought that my father was deliberately withholding information when he presented us with his problems. Usually, this information concerned future plans that he had in mind. Had we known of these plans from the first, our answers would have better reflected his actual needs.

When queried about this, his stock response was that we could have always come to him and asked, if we felt unsure about what his future plans were. This situation would have been more frustrating to us, if he hadn't been using the product of our thinking and advice to control and modify his own plans when steering the company in the direction he was taking it. It was a very heady thing, for people in their early twenties, seeing their own work being implemented, and integrated into the operational plans, for a three quarters of a billion dollar enterprise.

In November, primarily due to the work of our brain trust, my father committed two hundred million dollars to purchase the assets of a bankrupt Consolidated Foods. Our group had shown him a way to make the purchase without any outlay of our company cash, or any long term credit expense to be a drain on current profits. We even had a plan for retiring all the loans outstanding for the purchase, by splitting up the acquisition into multiple regional operations, and then selling off those areas where we were already showing a strong presence.

My father was very concerned that we were doing something that made our competitor's stronger in those regions. We were able to convince him that our way ended up giving us the core holdings in areas where we had previously been weak, at no cost to us, without tying us down with any new debt to pay for it. If we didn't purchase those assets, we told him, one or more of our competitors would, and it would then be us who didn't get any improvement from the situation.

"Some of their holdings in the Northeast and the Midwest would strengthen us, and their Southern distribution in Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida, is going to make Macklinson's a lot stronger than us in that region. They're the only ones who'll buy those holdings from us."

"Suppose Macklinson's decides to bid on the whole thing, Dad? Then, they end up getting what you're worried about now, plus they'll get a lot more strength in areas where they have no current presence. Would you rather have that? We need to split Consolidated up ourselves, to make sure we don't strengthen any single competitor more than we're strengthening ourselves. If we're the ones to make the purchase, we make the decisions about who we sell what to. If someone else makes it, we're going to be left out of that process. We can't afford to let that happen."

"I wanted you to find a way that we could buy those assets without needing to come up with any of our own cash, a way which would allow us to keep anything that would end up helping us."

My father really meant that he had hoped we'd be able to do that. We had hoped it too, but it just wasn't possible. He could figure out a way to borrow the money himself, but he also knew that he was buying a lot of dead wood. Half of what we'd be left with was nearly worthless. All of our competitor's would be expecting us to choke on what they saw as a white elephant.

Consolidated had been mismanaged to the point of extinction. They had never recovered from their earlier sudden flurry of ill thought out acquisitions, years before. They had become so worried about their share price dropping, that they had decided to sell everything they had acquired, to us, for pennies on the dollar. The interest payments on the leverage they had carried had eaten up any earnings their core business provided. Because of this, they had been unable to fund needed new purchases, and been forced to let their existing manufacturing and production assets deteriorate, getting to the point where they were becoming run down and obsolete.

Half of their actual worth to us was in their national distribution set up. It was a lot more valuable to us than it would have been to any of the other possible bidders. It was more valuable, because we had a good plan allowing us to fully exploit it. We already had a superior national distribution network of our own.

Joyce and Dale had come up with a method that would allow them to immediately sell off all of consolidated's distribution centers, primarily for their, somewhat hidden, real estate values, while keeping all the delivery channels fully operational, using our own available extra capacity at all the rail hubs that we already had leased, and under our control.

Before we ever put in a bid, we had made decisions about what we'd sell, and what we'd end up retaining for our own use. All five of us had worked hard on devising a workable plan before we ever presented it to my parents. We needed Mama's help for our short term financing strategy.

In addition to all the distribution centers, we were retaining five of their baking units, two on the west coast, one in Texas, another in Tennessee, and a small bread production factory in Michigan. The primary purposes for our keeping them was twofold, first, so that we could squeeze out more production, while converting them over to more modern equipment, and second, so that I could begin trading against their grain and ingredient needs. Down the road, after they had been converted, we hoped to use them to increase our market share in those geographical areas.

We knew that, with me stepping in and guaranteeing to make all their future grain deliveries at the spot market price, and with our more efficient and cost effective shipping and storage abilities, each of these baking plants would immediately be returned to some level of profitability. Each had been losing money when operated by Continental.

We already had the need for the amount of new production capacity this would add to our existing output. The entire purchase was hinging on our belief that we could keep everything operating at a profit long enough to allow us to convert each operation over to the newer, less labor intensive, ovens and automated packaging machinery. Our new plant in Omaha had paid for itself in less than three years of operation. The conversion costs were to be borne by the profits made from our existing baking operations.

Dad was hoping that we could renovate each baking unit, but spreading it out, over several slow, but well designed and thought out, stages. In this way, we'd be, over time, converting five obsolete factories into ones that were highly efficient to operate, with state of the art ovens and machinery. We didn't need the income we were generating from the baking operations. We could plow it all back into projects that improved our efficiency, and raised our rate of return.

Once converted, each baking plant would then be capable of producing significant profits again, by expanding on the number of shifts it could operate. In baking, production output and capacity was everything, and with our new equipment, and our shipping and distribution advantages, we could out produce, and out distribute, any of our then current competitor's.

All the rest of the Consolidated assets were going up for immediate resale. We were hoping that our competitor's would think we were being left stuck with all the deadwood. If so, their willingness to purchase the regional assets would be greater. We had price objectives set for each sale.

Another thing that was troubling to my father, was the plan we'd come up with to finance our purchase. Mama and I were putting up one hundred million dollars each. Since Dad was still the trustee of my main trust, he had to give his permission for me to do that.

He was primarily concerned because there was too much self dealing involved. He thought there might be a problem because both Mama's money, and my main trust assets were serving as partial guarantors on the bank consortium's line of credit which my father had put in place for the company.

He would have to get permission from the banking consortium to make those other funds available for the new acquisition. I didn't see any problem, since the new acquisition increased the worth of the company sufficiently to cover most, if not all, of the draw down in guarantor funds. It was simply an accounting change, and one that would end up leaving their security enhanced at the conclusion of the deal.

In the end, despite having some misgivings, my Dad went ahead with the purchase. Within a month, all of the distribution center assets were either already sold, or in escrow. Seventy five percent of the regional asset sell offs were also completed.

The only sale not yet consummated was for the Southern region assets we were going to sell to Macklinson's. We were ready to sell to them, but their offer to us was for three million less than what we had asked for, and had projected getting.

This delay in the last phase of our Consolidated's asset sell off was causing the bankers and my father some worry.

All of the brain trust people, my other wives, and all our children, were congregated together, up in the area around Joyce's office. I had come up from my Dad's office, after spending all morning listening to him dealing with one banker or another. It was becoming clear that we had to do something to get those assets sold.

I was talking to Joyce, Michael, and Dale, in Joyce's office. Eddie was in the kitchen with Brenda, getting something to drink. When she returned, Brenda and Shirley were with her, carrying trays with fresh made Italian sandwiches, and enough drinks for all the rest of us.