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 up. 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. Generally speaking, 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 really very shameful.
I write letters to the editor.
It started innocently enough. On my first go through, when I was 14, 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 on 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 a number of responses, both pro and con, which was probably 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 actually 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.
And 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.