I came over and switched my cane to my left hand and held out my right to Oprah. “Thank you for having me on your show.”
We settled ourselves on our chairs, and she started with, “So Doctor, explain what you mean about eating your peas!”
“Well, first, call me Carl. I almost never use the title. And second, I have to say, I’m not the author, but the co-author. The other guy who wrote this book, whose idea it really was, is Professor Harry Johnson, and he’s back home teaching engineering to students, so that our roads and bridges stay safe.” That got quite a bit of applause.
Oprah smiled at that. “Well, that is pretty important. Still, what does that have to do with eating peas?”
I spent a few minutes talking about how as a parent we always were trying to get the kids to eat their vegetables, which got us talking about how the tricks we used on my children and what our mothers had made us do. That played very well with the mostly female audience. Then we got into a little more substance, about how eating your vegetables made you strong, and that as a nation our infrastructure made us strong.
“You mentioned in the book that it was the Erie Canal that made New York the city it is today. How is that? The canal is 150 miles away from New York,” she said.
“That’s true, but the real outlet to the canal is not Albany or Schenectady, it’s at the end of the Hudson River, which is New York. This gets into a bit of the history of America. If you look at a map, there’s at least a half dozen major ports up and down the East Coast.” I started ticking them off on my fingers. “You have Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah, for instance. Each of them has a fine port and a good anchorage. So why did New York become the biggest seaport on the East Coast?”
I continued, “Let’s go back in time a couple of hundred years ago. There’s no cars, no trains, no decent roads, and a few hundred miles to the west, there’s this big mountain range. It’s actually very difficult to get through the Appalachian Mountains to the lands on the other side. If you were a farmer in Ohio, for instance, it was actually cheaper to send your grain down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, load it on a ship, and sail it to New York, than it was to try to drive a mule train overland.”
There were some incredulous murmurs at that, but I just smiled and nodded. Horses and mules would eat their weight in grain hauling stuff that distance. Oprah said, “So the Erie Canal solved that problem?”
“It’s incredibly cheap to ship stuff on a barge. Shipping costs dropped to one-twentieth of hauling things overland. The Erie Canal was the biggest infrastructure project of the era, like the interstate system of its day. All of a sudden, you could ship corn or wheat or ore from the Midwest to the East Coast quickly and cheaply. Trade grew over the course of the 1800s by an incredible margin. It went the other way, too. Now the East Coast could ship cloth and plows and glass and all sorts of other expensive and exotic items to the Midwest. One of the most important items shipped was salt! To make salt you needed sea water, and the lakes and rivers west of the Appalachians are all fresh water. And it all shipped over the Erie Canal to the Midwest.”
“And that was here in Chicago?” she asked. “Why not any of the other cities on the Great Lakes?”
“Well, they were helped too. It was at this time that all the big cities of the Great Lakes area were founded or grew big. Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee — all of them made the big time after the Erie Canal opened up the Midwest. The big thing that Chicago had going for it is that within just a few miles from here, the rivers stop draining north and east, and start draining south. The people here in Chicago are pretty smart! They saw what was happening elsewhere, and how much trade was going to New York. They looked around and figured out that if they built a canal of their own, they could ship stuff from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi, and that gave them access to the entire center of the nation.”
“It’s like two ends of a giant bridge, between the East Coast and the Midwest,” she commented.
“And that’s why this stuff is so important! It’s not just that we have roads or bridges or canals or sewers or dams. This stuff shapes how a country grows, and if you don’t take care of it, it stops growing. We’re seeing that now with the Interstate Highway system.”
“How so?”
“Well, the interstates are like the canals of the last century. Look at the changes in society in the last thirty years, the growth of the suburbs, the increase in trucking, the changes to the inner city. Now, the highway system was developed in the late Fifties, and most of the roads and bridges have 40 year life spans. If we don’t start taking better care of them now, we are going to see some pretty spectacular collapses over the next ten years!” I told her.
“What caused your interest in this subject? You’re a mathematician, not an engineer,” Oprah asked.
I smiled at that. “It was just by chance. Harry, that is Professor Harry Johnson, my co-author, and I exchanged some letters to the editor by way of the Baltimore Sun, and that’s how we met.”
Oprah’s eyes opened wide. “The Baltimore Sun!?”
I grinned and nodded. “That’s right. We share that in common, don’t we? You worked in Baltimore for a few years before you made it to the big leagues, here in Chicago. I remember watching you on the news every once in a while.”
She excitedly added, “Yes, I worked for WJZ!”
“I remember you from back then. Harry and I are both Baltimore boys. He teaches engineering down at UMBC in Arbutus, and I live and work up in Hereford.”
“That brings up another question,” she said. I looked at her curiously, and she segued into what I had hoped could be avoided. “You have a most interesting biography! You went to college and earned your doctorate in mathematics at the age of 21, is that correct?”
I nodded. “Yes. I went to Rensselaer in Troy, New York, and got my math degrees there.”
“But you didn’t go into research or teaching! You entered the Army.”
Again I nodded, with a shrug and a smile. “Well, I went to college on an Army scholarship, so at some point Uncle Sam was going to come calling for some payback”
“What would a mathematician do in the army?” she asked, somewhat incredulously.
“Oh, there’s any number of things! Codes and cryptography, signals, engineering — I was in the artillery, and that’s a huge amount of mathematics!” I answered.
“Is that where you hurt your leg?”
I wasn’t sure how much info was in my bio that had been sent out. The average host could care less. “Yes, I made that one jump too many and landed wrong.”
“Jump? You were a paratrooper?”
I smiled and nodded again. “I had a battery of 105s with the 82nd.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Sorry. I commanded Bravo Battery, 1st Battalion of the 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, in the 82nd Airborne Division. At least until this happened,” I said with a wry shrug. “Don’t ever jump out of a perfectly good airplane!”
There was a smattering of applause at this. A decade earlier I might have been booed, since the Viet Nam War had been so unpopular. Still, we hadn’t become so wildly enthusiastic about our soldiers as we would be following Desert Storm. I just smiled and nodded to the audience as they politely applauded.
“And now you work for an investment company? Or own an investment company? I understand you are part of the Buckman Group. What is that?”
“We’re in the private equity and capital investment business. We’re small and private.”