I hit the button on my phone and said, “Out in a second.” Then I stood up and left my office, going down the hall. I found Johnson in the lobby, looking around in a somewhat bewildered fashion. “Harry! Good to see you again!” I held my hand out to shake his.
“Carl, thank you. What is this place? What do you do here?” he asked.
I smiled. “Remember how I told you my degrees were in applied math?” He nodded, and I continued, “Well, the application is money! We’re a private venture capital firm.”
“Wall Street? That sort of thing? And the company is named after you? You must be pretty important, then.”
I smiled at that. “You could say that. I’m the majority owner. Come on back to my office.”
“How come the receptionist didn’t call you Doctor Buckman?”
Trust a scientist to worry about titles. One place I worked, on my first go, was a research lab, where the size of your desk was based on your college degree. Lab techs didn’t get a desk, lab techs with an associates degree got a rickety standup desk, a bachelors degree earned you a four foot long desk with drawers on one side, a masters upgraded you to a five foot desk, and PhDs had a six foot desk with drawers on both sides. “I’m lucky she said ‘Mister.’ Most of the time it’s Carl or ‘Hey, you!’ We’re pretty informal around here.”
Once in my office, I directed Harry over to the lounge area, where I had my couch and the armchairs. “Okay, shoot! What’s this about a book?”
Harry explained his ideas. Last year, in 1986, he had been approached by the non-fiction arm of Simon and Schuster, the publishing house, about writing a book about infrastructure and economics based on a series of papers he had written. At the time, he had turned them down, because it was obvious that what they wanted was something he didn’t know how to write. Like I had said the other night, they needed something in layman’s terms. They came to him because he was a leading authority in the field.
They came back to him last month, shortly after the Schoharie Creek Bridge on the New York State Thruway was washed out. The time was right for a book on the subject. I actually knew a fair bit about this, since in my previous life, I knew about the bridge. Unfortunately for the sake of the book, the collapse was not due to poor maintenance, but because unprecedented flooding had washed the supports out from under the bridge. Ten people died.
The more Harry talked, the more I warmed to the subject. In a way, it reminded me of my valedictory speech, which had been reread at the reunion a few years ago. Taxes are what we pay so we can have bridges and roads and sewers and water and stuff. This shit is boring and expensive and nobody wants to hear about it, but it is also important!
I sat there and listened, and about the time when Harry began to repeat himself, I held up my hands and made the Time-Out gesture. “Okay, I think I am getting the gist of this. Now, how do you see this book working? Break out the relevant sections. What makes this book special? Why should anybody buy this book?”
Harry Johnson was not accustomed to thinking like this. In his academic world, you wrote dense papers with arcane stuff for fellow specialists, published it in specialized journals, and talked about things to other specialists. I had never written a book either, but my life had never been the pure science and engineering lifestyle. Harry began stumbling through some ideas and slowly a vision began forming in my mind.
In the work section of my office, near the conference table, I had a wall full of white boards. I motioned for Harry to follow me and I grabbed a dry erase marker and began outlining various sections of the book. “For one thing, we can’t make this just about roads or bridges. Infrastructure covers a lot of other stuff — dams, sewer systems, water systems, canals — all sorts of things. Nobody is going to read about just one thing, but if we do a just a chapter or two on each item, we can do a survey style book for the public.”
“I don’t have information on those things. My specialty is bridges and roads,” he protested.
I shrugged this off. “So what?! You know who does know this stuff, you can find the relevant papers and technical info, and you can make sure we credit everybody involved. Then we have to find relevant and current examples of problems, and put them in the appropriate chapter.”
“There was a dam collapse in Italy a couple of years ago. We could put that in the section on dams,” he offered.
I shook my head. “No, we need American examples. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure it was a tragedy, but American readers won’t care about disasters somewhere else. We’ll need examples from places the readers have heard about and can relate to. They won’t care about stuff that happens overseas.”
“That’s incredibly callous!” he protested.
Unfortunately, he was right. I sat down on the conference table and nodded to him. “I know. This is a situation where we’re both right. The problem is that I’m talking about a book designed to appeal to the American reader. People can be very insular on these things. For one thing, like I said, they at least will have some idea where a location in the U.S. is, and may have heard about it on the news. For another thing, you tell the average guy on the street that a bridge in a foreign country collapsed, they will immediately figure, ‘Of course it did! It was built by a bunch of foreigners!’ It won’t matter if the entire work force went to MIT or not.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes it is, but very human. Take a look at our own news on TV. A fishing boat that sinks with three people drowning will get more television time on the news than a ferryboat in the Philippines that sinks and loses a thousand!” I just shrugged and held my hands up in a what-can-you-do-about-it gesture. “It’s not fair and it’s not right, but you know it happens.”
“So you see this book as appealing to the average reader?”
I had to think about that. “You know, I just don’t know. We’d need to talk to the publishing house about that. I would think it would appeal more to the college educated intellectual types rather than high school educated readers. The guy who reads Scientific American, not Field and Stream. Also, probably the readers of political books.”
“Why politics?”
Professor Johnson really was a babe in the woods. “Infrastructure means money, money means politics.”
“Oh, yes.”
“So, still interested?” I asked him.
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yeah, actually, I am. I’ll need to do some of this at home or after hours, but I get a certain amount of leeway with my schedule. It helps to have your name on the door. Who do you see doing what?”
“You’ll have to do most of the writing, with me providing the technical information.”
“Okay, but you’ll need to go through and edit it, and then I’ll have to edit your edits, and then the publishing house will probably toss the entire thing anyway and make us start over again from scratch,” I answered.
That made Harry smile. “Fifty-fifty split?”
“You can even have top billing.” I held out my hand and we shook on it. Then I went to the door to my office and opened it. “HEY! WE GOT A LAWYER AROUND HERE?” I yelled out the door.
A couple of people down the hallway stopped and stared at me, and then both John and Jake Junior stuck their heads out of their doors. “What have you done now!?” asked John.
“Just the man I want to see.” Junior just rolled his eyes and smiled, and went back into his office. John came down the hall and entered my office. “John, this is Professor Harold Johnson from over at UMBC. Harry, this is John Steiner.”