Chapter 89: Letters To The Editor

We made a parents-only trip to Hougomont in mid-August and did pretty much everything we had talked about around the pool that night. We didn’t pack any underwear, we did pack some club dresses for Marilyn, and we did screw every way possible down there. I even went skinny-dipping with her one afternoon and then used the suntan lotion as lube for an assfuck on the beach. It was an excellent diversion before coming home and getting back to normal.

Normal was rather... normal! We put Charlie in the local elementary school, Fifth District Elementary, which, despite its totally unimaginative name, seemed like a nice enough school. Besides, the most important part of any school is whether the parents want their child to succeed. I could put Charlie in the fanciest prep school in the country, but if I don’t do my job as his father, he’d flunk. Neither Marilyn nor I would allow our kids to flunk that way.

We had debated putting Charlie and the girls in parochial school, but I was resistant. For one thing, Fifth District was barely five minutes from our house, right down Mount Carmel Road in Upperco. Our Lady of Grace was in Parkton, at the corner of York and Middletown, and probably fifteen to twenty minutes away. Secondly, my taxes were already paying for the public schools, and while I could buy both schools out of petty cash, it seemed wasteful.

Finally, I just have an inherent bias against parochial schools. I did just fine in public schools, both this time and the last, and I was nowhere near as impressed with the job the Catholic schools in Utica had done with the Lefleurs. Or it could just be that what little religious belief I’ve retained, I still consider myself a Lutheran, hard-core Protestant, and more than a little skeptical of Catholicism and their schooling. Well, all except the Jesuits, who have a solid reputation as scholars, and run some first-rate colleges. You might graduate a convert, but you’ll have learned how to think!

If there was a problem with Fifth District, we could always reconsider. Until then, it was a whole lot closer to run down the road. Charlie didn’t seem to mind. You know those commercials where the child tearfully clings to his parents rather than climb on the school bus? (Marilyn had driven him to kindergarten last year.) Forget it! Charlie scampered down the driveway, climbed up the steps into the bus, and never looked back! I had gone outside with Marilyn to watch this momentous occasion. Marilyn and I just looked at each other and laughed. “Isn’t this supposed to be really sentimental? Isn’t he supposed to cry or something?” I asked.

“So much for missing Mommy and Daddy!” she replied.

“Wait until he starts asking to ride his little motorcycle to school.” Marilyn just rolled her eyes at that. I stood there for a moment watching the black GMC following behind the bus. It had followed the bus from the bus garage, would hang around in the parking lot of the school, and then tail the bus home again. Fifth District wasn’t thrilled, but I bought them off with a new computer system.

I gave Marilyn a quick kiss good-bye, and then climbed into my car to go to the office. “I’ll be back by 5:30 or so.”

Charlie was still five when he started first grade, just like I had been. In Maryland the cutoff date was the calendar year, so if you turned six by December 31, you started school when you were five. Charlie was an October baby, I was born in November, and Hamilton had been born in December, so we all started school at five. The twins, born in the summer, would start at six. It didn’t seem a problem for Charlie, though. While Hamilton and I had been small as little kids, Charlie was big for his age.

The article in Fortune proved to be a mixed blessing. Now that the world knew of us, people started beating a path to our door. It got worse when somebody at Dell blabbed that we were involved with them, too. Mike Dell wasn’t too amused when this all came out, but the article in Business Week clearly stated it was a Dell insider who spilled the beans. Both Business Week and Forbes ran articles on venture capital and high tech, and we were listed prominently with the other outfits who specialized in this area. At least I didn’t make the cover, though my picture was on the insides in both magazines.

I was a little embarrassed by it all, but Marilyn took it with a great sense of humor. After reading the Forbes article, she had spent the rest of the night teasing me about it, whenever the kids were out of earshot, and gushing about how she got to sleep with a celebrity! I ended up giving her a good swat on the behind, which earned me some more laughter, and then later, after she put the kids to bed, I gave her a totally different kind of punishment!

Business wise, the publicity was generally a good thing. It gave us a lot of legitimacy in the industry, which brought both business and employees to our door. We began to debate opening a California office, maybe in the Palo Alto area, and trying to figure out how we would run that. It would mean additional travel for both me and Jake Junior since neither of us wanted to move. He had started getting serious about a girl in the Perry Hall area, who was divorced and shared custody of their son with her husband, and who wasn’t about to move. One possibility was finding somebody at one of the Sand Hill Road outfits and enticing them to jump ship and start up a new branch. We’d have to cut him in for a piece of the pie, for sure, but there just might be benefits to it. Fortunately, I remembered a lot of the names who made it big in the business, and I knew which ones to avoid, no matter what their pedigree was.

As for the new business, some was good, a lot was bad, and some was just ridiculous. We were approached by one guy who wanted us to back him on a chain of vending machines selling fresh roasted peanuts! This guy was convinced that people across the country were dying to stand next to a vending machine for five minutes or more so that they could get fresh roasted peanuts from it. The craziest ideas would get tacked to a bulletin board in the break room and was known as the ‘Hall of Shame!’ That one certainly qualified.

In early 1987, one of the strangest opportunities opened. I became an author! Well, co-author, I suppose, and really, more like a glorified editor. It all came about because of one of my more innocuous habits. It’s harmless, and almost never gets me into trouble. Most of the time nobody even knows about it. I certainly don’t advertise it, although it’s not very shameful.

I write letters to the editor.

It started innocently enough. On my first go through, when I was fourteen, I had read an article in Popular Science about canoeing, and I wrote back, adding my two cents worth about something I can’t remember anymore, but it got published two issues later. It was like that first hit on the crack pipe, and I was hooked! Over the years I kept reading magazines and newspapers and smoking the crack. What I didn’t realize when I started it but learned later when I had to edit the company newsletter, was how desperate most publishers and editors are to fill in all the white space.

I had letters published in everything from the local newspaper to major national magazines. An article on pharmaceutical sales techniques in Time earned a response that was printed. Two scholarly notes on Iran and ship building programs got published in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. One amusing time was when a local bridge in Otsego County was closed for repairs and took three years to reopen. I wrote in the Oneonta Daily Star how I wasn’t voting for the local state senator until it got fixed, and I urged other readers to do the same. Within two days I was placed on the senator’s mailing list and received weekly updates on all he was doing about the bridge. Marilyn thought this was just as funny as I did. Another time I wrote a response to an article in the RPI alumni magazine after they wrote that KGS had bought a new chapter house in 2010 that had once been a home for unwed mothers. My response was that this was quite appropriate, since so many Keggers had spent so much time helping girls fill the home to begin with. That earned me some hate mail from that generation of Keggers and general applause from everybody else.

Nothing had changed on this go around. You write a letter that either vents about something or refutes some asshole. Nine chances out of ten, the editors shitcan it anyway. It doesn’t matter, since just writing it makes you feel better anyway, and gives you a reason to turn to the Letters page first.

In this case, the Baltimore Sun had written an article about the cost of maintenance on the Bay Bridge. Some jackass had written saying that the cost was excessive, and that taxpayer money shouldn’t be spent maintaining a bridge that was incorrectly and incompetently built to begin with, and that the contractors should be sued. I had responded with an even longer piece that countered that the cost was not excessive, that it was well within the expected costs forecast originally, and that maintenance needed to be performed on all equipment. My response got picked up and published on the op-ed page as a guest editorial, which surprised the hell out of me. My note sparked several responses, both pro and con, which was probably what they figured would happen and why they published it in the first place.

One of those responses turned out to be very interesting. A professor of civil engineering at UMBC wrote back with a lengthy dissertation on infrastructure maintenance that was way too long and technical for the Sun to publish, but they sent it to me along with a personal note. Maybe I wanted to talk to this guy. I read through his stuff and quickly jotted a note back to him, letting him know I had received his information from the Sun, but that they didn’t plan to publish it. I agreed with much of what he was saying and thanked him for the interest.

What happened next surprised me. I received a second note, sent directly to me this time, with about a two-inch-thick stack of scientific papers, some by him, and some by others, on the effects of deteriorating infrastructure and the costs of repair. It was rather interesting. I spent the better part of an afternoon at the office working my way through the papers, and then figured out his phone number over at the college. Then I called him and thanked him, and he invited me to a symposium he was a part of on Thursday evening, on Infrastructure Requirements and Maintenance.

That was how I met Professor Harold Johnson. Wednesday night I told Marilyn I would probably be late coming home on Thursday, and that I would probably be eating in town. When she asked why, I explained about the papers I had gotten. “Going back to being a scientist?” she teased.

I put on my best haughty demeanor, and answered, “I’ll have you know I’ve always been a scientist, and you lesser breeds should recognize my inherent superiority!”

“Oh, really? Maybe such a superior person should sleep in the library tonight, so that the ideas in those books can seep in.”

I came around the kitchen island and hugged her shoulder. “No, I think that if I sleep with you, maybe my superior ideas and thoughts could seep into you!”

“With an attitude like that, nothing else is going to be seeping in!” she replied.

“Hmmm ... Maybe I could come up with a special sleep teaching technique.” We kept teasing back and forth until after dinner. Later that night Marilyn allowed me to sleep in our bed, and I worked on that special technique with her.

UMBC, the University of Maryland - Baltimore County, is in Arbutus, down on the southwestern side of Baltimore. It is right next door to Catonsville Community College, otherwise known to us locals as either USC, the University of Southern Catonsville, or UCLA, University of Catonsville, Left at Arbutus. Depending on the time of day, it is about 40 minutes from Hereford. Run down to the Beltway and then turn right, and travel around the city. The symposium was at 7:00 PM, so I drove down to Towson, had some dinner in town, and then drove down to Arbutus.

The symposium was held in a lecture hall in the Engineering Building. I parked in a lot to the west of the building and went in. Traffic had been heavy on the Beltway, so I got there about fifteen minutes late. I slipped in a door in the back of the room and sat in one of the rear seats. The symposium had professors of engineering and economics and political science, and the audience was composed of what looked like grad students for the various professors. No surprise there. I must have been the only member of the general public to attend, and I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been specifically invited.

Nothing new was discussed, although I generally found it interesting. Most of the discussion was about roads and bridges, and how the nation’s infrastructure was deteriorating. This was pretty much true at the time and was only going to get worse. By the time of the Great Recession, vast areas of the country were being left to rot without any maintenance at all. If a bridge collapsed, it was left that way, and the residents were shit out of luck. Potholes became the new roadways. Putting up traffic cones was cheaper than replacing guardrails when somebody went off the road. Nobody at the symposium came up with any ways to stop the problem, and at the end the grad students left, their mandatory attendance duly noted.

It was just shy of 9:00 when the meeting broke up, and I got out of my chair and walked down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall. Dr. Johnson was the resident expert on bridges and roads. I stepped over the low railing around the stage area and went up to him. “Professor Johnson?”

He looked up at me. “Yes? Can I help you?”

I smiled and put my hand out. “Carl Buckman, Doctor. You invited me to the symposium, remember?”

“Oh, yes, thank you for coming. It’s nice when we can get somebody other than just us academics to one of these things.”

“I quite agree. I remember those days myself.”

“Oh?” he asked.

I handed him one of my business cards with the PhD behind my name. “Yes, a few years ago I was a grad student myself.”

His eyebrows raised slightly. “Where did you go to school?”

“Rensselaer. I got a doctorate in applied mathematics about ten years ago. It seems like another lifetime.”

“I know RPI. I got my bachelor’s at Clarkson.”

“Do you still follow hockey?” I asked. Clarkson-RPI had been a major Division I rivalry for years.

He grinned. “Not for many years. It was always good for a date, though.” I smiled and nodded along with him. “I should have known by your response to that idiot letter to the editor you had a mathematical background. I just wish more people cared about these things. Nothing gets done until something terrible happens.”

“It’s the nature of the beast, Professor. When times are good, we don’t want to spend the money. When times are bad, we don’t have the money to spend. Unless you’ve figured out a way to re-engineer humans, nothing happens unless you make it happen,” I answered. I glanced at my watch. We were the last ones in the lecture hall, and it was after 9:00. “I suppose we need to leave. It looks like they are about to lock us in for the night.”

“I wish we could talk longer.”

I was on the verge of saying goodbye, but for some reason I postponed it a bit. “I could do with a late bite to eat. How about you, Professor? Anywhere nearby we can grab a cup of coffee or something?”

He looked a little startled at that. “Not really sure. I think most of the local diners are closed. We might find a sandwich shop or something. There’s a pretty nice place down South Rolling Road on Frederick, Russell’s, but it might be pricey for a cup of coffee.”

I waved this off with a smile. “My treat. It feels good to get back into the scientific world.” Johnson gave me an odd look at that, so I said, “I’ll explain when we get there.”

I waited while the professor packed his briefcase and then followed him outside. Five minutes later I followed him into a parking lot on Frederick. I led him inside. Very nice, large, with lots of tables and a few booths. By now the evening rush was long over and we were among the last wave of diners.

The hostess seated us in a booth and gave us our menus, and a pretty, young waitress came over. “Hello. My name is Gretchen and I’ll be serving you. Can I get you gentlemen something to drink while you decide what you want?”

I smiled and nodded. “It’s been a long day. Can I get a gin and tonic?” I looked over at Johnson and said, “Remember, my treat.”

He smiled back and ordered a Manhattan. Then, after Gretchen left, he said, “Well, I don’t turn down too many free meals. What do you normally do? What’s your day job?”

I nodded. “Ah, what did I do when I left RPI with my doctorate?” He nodded, and I said, “Well, for a few years I worked for Uncle Sam. I went to school on an ROTC scholarship, so after graduation I went into the Army. When I got out of the Army, I started an investment company. That’s what I do now.”

“You started an investment company?” he asked incredulously.

I smiled. “Mathematics offers a number of very lucrative career choices, Doctor.”

“I guess so.”

We chatted a few minutes about RPI and Clarkson, and I admitted that I had hurt my leg in the Army, and that was why I used a cane. When the waitress came back with our drinks, she asked, “Ready to order now?”

I had glanced at my menu and knew what I wanted. “Are the crab cakes good?”

“The crab cakes are great!”

“Sounds good to me.” I handed Gretchen the menu and we looked at Johnson.

“I’m sold. The same for me, please.”

“Two crab cake orders coming right up.” She left.

I sipped my drink, and it was just what I needed. “Ahh, that hits the spot. I have to drive tonight, so I can’t have more than two, but it’s been a long day.”

Johnson drank some of his and gave a childish grin. “I feel like I’m breaking the rules, drinking on a school night. My wife and I usually just have a few drinks over the weekend.”