I looked over at my buddy. "Can you believe this shit?"
Tusker smiled and shook his head. "All too easily!"
We headed back in, Dum-Dum leading the way. We got inside and I said, "You won't believe what these two were doing."
Marilyn was pulling her coat back on. "I'll believe it later. We're going to the hospital now."
"WHAT!?"
"Your son has a broken arm.", she announced.
"What?!" I turned to Charlie, who was sitting at the kitchen table, still cradling his arm and looking unhappy, but not crying. I knelt down in front of him and asked, "What's wrong, buddy?"
"My arm hurts.", he answered, still cradling it.
"Here, let Daddy see." I reached out and looked at his arm as best I could, despite his histrionic complaints. It was obvious something was wrong, and there was a big lump under the skin at his wrist. I looked up at the others, and nodded. "I think you're right.", I told Marilyn.
She snorted. "I ought to make you put that in writing. I might never hear it again!" She went to the utility room and grabbed Charlie's coat.
"When can Charlie go out and play again?", asked Bucky.
Marilyn looked like she was going to yell at Bucky, but then her face softened. "Not, today, Bucky. Charlie got hurt and we have to take him to the doctor."
"Oh." Then he looked worried. "Are we in trouble, Aunt Marilyn?"
She smiled, as did the rest of us. "No more than usual, Bucky. No more than usual." To me she said, "You stay here with the girls. The last thing we need is all of us going to the hospital."
"Emergency room at GBMC?"
She nodded. "You're in charge of the girls."
I eyed my daughters, now imprisoned in the jail, and wondered who might be getting the better part of this deal. Marilyn put Charlie's right arm into his coat sleeve, and then zipped it up, rather than try to force his left arm through the sleeve.
Tessa and Tusker decided to take their pair home at this point as well. "Call me later and let us know how it went.", Tessa said. They took off and I helped Marilyn get Charlie into his car seat, and they left as well.
They returned several hours later, with Charlie's arm wrapped in a gigantic Ace bandage, and an appointment to see an orthopedics doctor on Monday. Yes, he had a broken arm, specifically his left radius bone was broken down near the wrist. Monday morning I went to the office as normal, and Marilyn dropped the girls off with me for a few hours while she continued on with Charlie. They returned around lunchtime, with Charlie in a big white plaster cast and an even bigger smile. This was just so cool! He couldn't wait to go sledding again, and this time they would get the ski jump right!
God save me!
The whole office signed Charlie's cast and we sent them on their way to go to Friendly's for ice cream. I debated calling Andrea and having her book me a flight to Timbuctoo. I wasn't sure I wanted to be around when those two figured the ski jump out!
The ski jump idea got a lot closer the next summer. On Bucky's eighth birthday, his father got him a larger motorbike for motocross racing. Bucky got a 65 cc. dirt bike, and Tusker asked Marilyn and me if we wanted his older and smaller 50 cc. bike. Marilyn wasn't all that thrilled, but we'd never hear the end of it if we didn't at least give him a shot at it. Tusker gave us the bike; we simply had to go down to his store and buy him a helmet and some racing leathers. Tusker sold them, too, and I think they cost more than the bike! Tusk Cycle was a full stop shop, and would happily relieve you of all the money in your wallet, and then sell you a biker's wallet. On the other hand, since I was a part owner, I was recycling my money. Sort of.
Regardless, Charlie was in seventh heaven with that thing. Once we got it home, he started it up and put on his helmet and then immediately began riding. It turned out that Bucky had been giving him lessons whenever the various parental units weren't looking! Within two days, Charlie was riding all over the property, driving Dum-Dum crazy, and carving our 25 acres into a dirt bike track.
Marilyn watched him with considerable trepidation. What she secretly wanted, I knew, was for Charlie to have an accident, nothing serious, but enough of one that he would convince himself to stop riding a motorcycle. I knew better. I wasn't any more thrilled than she was, but at almost five, Charlie was as much of a biker as his Uncle Tusker. By the end of the summer, we let him ride in his first official race. He placed second, and wanted to know when he could come back again, because he wanted to win! His mother and I congratulated him, and then looked at each other with concern. We had created a monster!
Chapter 88: Celebrity
In July of '86 my happily anonymous life came to an end. I suppose I should have realized it was going to happen, but it just never occurred to me. It was my fault, of course, but I never thought it through.
I made the cover of Fortune magazine.
If I had stayed home and just counted my money, nobody would have ever have known about me. No, I let my friends, people that I trusted, talk me into becoming a businessman, so it was all my fault.
I should have known better. When you become successful, people want to know about you, and other people start writing newspaper and magazine stories about you. In this case, Fortune decided to write an article about the venture capital and private equity business. Well, that was our business, and we were one of the smaller but more successful firms in the field. It was probably inevitable that this would happen sooner or later, and it's better to be in the newspapers for being successful than for going bankrupt.
Looking back on it, we figured that the press first learned about us when we were listed in Microsoft's prospectus prior to their Initial Public Offering, or IPO. As owners of 6% of the company, we were named. By July, the prospectus for Adobe Systems was out as well, and we were listed there, too. We had already been named in the IPO for Autodesk the year before, but nobody had come to ask us then. Three tech companies going public in the space of a year, with the same small and unknown private equity outfit listed? That was too much of a coincidence!
We had prepared for this eventuality, to a certain extent. We had created brief bios on all five of the principals in the company, both for SEC purposes and for various prospectuses. These were limited to our professional qualifications and history, and pretty bland. 'Mr. Buckman graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1977 and then served four years in the United States Army... ' - that sort of thing. We worked them up for all of us.
Initially, Melissa got the call from the New York office of Fortune, asking for a response and assistance in a story about the private equity and venture capital business. When I asked her why she agreed to help, her response was simple. "They're going to write a story either way. You want them to print that the Buckman Group was unresponsive and secretive?"
I grimaced but agreed with her. In Hollywood they might say that the only bad publicity is no publicity, but that didn't necessarily apply to us. Her response had been to send them our curriculum vitae, and we generated a nicely bland press release acknowledging our involvement with the recent IPOs. I never gave it another thought. I figured they would focus on the big name firms out on Sand Hill Road, like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, or maybe a couple of the New York or Boston firms. We would be, at best, a blip in a paragraph at the bottom of the piece.