Category: StoryWorth

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How America has changed in my lifetime

My story worth – How has the country changed in your lifetime?

The surprising success of a fundamentally lazy man

I thought of writing a book about my life’s experience. I didn’t get very far, but I came up with a title – “The surprising success of a fundamentally lazy man.” I am not saying that I was not active, but rather that I was always very lucky and did not have to exert myself doing lots of things I did not want to do. My luck, however, was not the windfall type. My sort of luck has been the changing environment in our country. On several key occasions, conditions developed in ways that suited my peculiar talents and predilections, so I have a personal view of how the country changed in my lifetime.

My chances would not have seemed that good when I was born in 1955. There were fewer opportunities for people like me. My father, like everybody else in my family and neighborhood, was a worker. He was intelligent and a hard worker, but those were the kinds of opportunities available to people like him. Nobody had a college education. My father never even graduated high school. Nobody traveled internationally except at the invitation of their Uncle Sam to fight in Europe, the Pacific, the Korean Peninsula or Vietnam. There is no reason to believe my life would have been any different had I been born a few decades earlier.

Right time and right place
But things were changing, and it was good to be born in America in the 1950s and this was my first bit of good luck. Call it “American privilege” along with “temporal privilege,” i.e. right place at the right time. America had become the richest and open large society in the history of the world and opportunities were everywhere. This lucky break was further enhanced by an emphasis on science education and physical fitness in school in response to perceived threats by the Soviet Union. When the Russians launched Sputnik, the USA responded urgently, and a generation of Americans benefited. It was like standing on an escalator. I am not saying that individual effort was not important, but we were all moving up. So, I grew up in the Space Age and was immensely proud to watch Americans bouncing around on the moon. In all candor, the images were bad, and our crappy TV made them worse, but it was enough to know that they were up there. The moon would never look the same.

Boomer babies and the generation gap
My generation was part of the baby boom, the largest generation of Americans. Each generation must reestablish civilization by converting barbarians (i.e. young people) to the ways of civilization. Our generation almost overwhelmed the system. There were more of us and more of us went to college than ever before. Our parents’ generation was much less educated. Many of us were the first in our families to go to college, and that made some of us think that made us better than those on whose shoulders we stood. It created a “generation gap” and the young often rejected the values of their elders.

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” – this quote attributed to Mark Twain. The whole country went through something like this in the 1960s.

Not just for rich kids anymore
And opportunities were becoming more widely available. I have often quoted what my father told me when I told him about the Foreign Service. “Don’t bother. That’s only for rich kids,” he said. He was wrong for me and my generation but probably right for him and his. People like my father could not aspire to something like the FS, if they were even aware that it existed (usually not). That clearly changed in my generation.

The 1960s were a time of great change. Technically, the 1960s started in 1960 and ended in 1970, but if you look to how events played out, it is more accurate to say that the 1960s started with the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. The 1960s produced a lot of change, much of it good especially in the area of civil rights, and the music was good, but the times were generally unpleasant and divisive because we were fighting a divisive war. The Vietnam war was permanently changed the way Americans saw their country and created political fault lines you can still see today. President Johnson fought the war at the same time he was expanding social programs. In the parlance of the times, he wanted both guns and butter. It worked for a while. We paid of it in the 1970s. Overspending in the 1960s and the breakdown of the post-war economic system stored up inflation and economic challenge. When OPEC quadrupled oil prices in 1973, the good times we had enjoyed since the end of WWII were not what we were living anymore.

A cold, dark and generally depressing decade
I graduated HS in 1973 and the country was embarking on a decade long series of crises. We had an energy crisis, a population bomb, an ecological crisis, and various political challenges. Even winters were worse. The 1976-7 & 1977-8 winters were record cold and snow, at least in the Midwest. We worried about global cooling in those days. In those years it had never been colder before and it has never been as cold since. Anyway, the 1970s sucked, and the prognosis was for worse. If I went back and told my younger self how life turned out, the young guy would not have believed it. During those dark and cold 1970s, however, technology was being developed that would help me personally. They were calculators and computers that could check spelling.

Technology takes away rote tasks
I am reasonably competent at math, but I cannot do arithmetic well. Similarly, I can write well, but I spell poorly. Arithmetic ability and spelling well are/were “threshold skills.” I would have had a hard time jumping over that threshold. Technology cheapened those skills. It is helpful to be good at arithmetic, but you no longer need it for math. Spelling is now almost optional. If I type anything near the word I want, the machine fixes it.
This is part of a very important change in America, but one that is almost invisible. Technology like this changed our point of view about the very meaning of intelligence. In that past, intelligence was associated with skills like doing arithmetic or being able to recall facts. This has changed. What matters today is capacity to assemble and relate concepts. The ability to add, subtract, multiply or divide columns of numbers is more a curiosity than a valuable skill. Just as power tools replaced human muscles, computer power has replaced human clerical and arithmetic skills. People used to do what machines do. In Dickens’ famous book “A Christmas Carol”, Scrooge’s employee, Bob Cratchit, is a computer. That is what they called people like him in those days. His job mostly consisted of doing arithmetic and filling in forms. Today, as Excel program does in seconds what Cratchit had to stay late to do on Christmas eve.

And the Internet
I dreamed the impossible dream in grad school. I envisioned a world where knowledge would just be available. I thought how great it would be if I could just search through the accumulated wisdom of the ages. I thought that would never be possible. The very rich could hire researchers. The rest of us could haunt used bookshops. The dream came through faster and better than I imagined. How much is the Internet worth? It does not appear on our accounts because it is free. How impressive is that? Today, I have better access to the world’s knowledge, to maps, charts and research than even a president had when I was young. We take it for granted now. It is so big that it is hard to see.

Diversity
America became much more open and diverse in my lifetime. In many ways, this was back to the future. America in 1910 was more diverse than America in 2010 in that there existed a greater variety of cultural norms and disparate lifestyles. It is true that most of the immigrants came from Europe, but a Polish peasant or an Italian worker in 1900 would have had less contact with Americans than just about anybody has today. The world is just much more connected today. But America in 1960s was the least diverse in our history. The Immigration Act of 1965 changed this. The 1960 census found that almost 89% of the population was white. Immigrants made up the smallest percentage ever of the American population. Immigration was the experience of our grandparents. We thought of it as a historical heritage thing. The country had gone through the homogenizing effects of the Great Depression, World War and Cold War. Most people had access to no more than three TV stations. We all watched the same things. (72% of Americans tuned in to watch the last episode of “the Fugitive” in 1967) Much of this changed in my lifetime. It is great to have the variety but maybe a little sad to lose the unity.

Healthy, wealthy & wise?
How would I assess the changes in my almost 64 years? America was great when I was born; it is even better now. Most of the thing I worried about as a young man were either problems solved, or situations transcended. I was profoundly worried about the environment. It is so much better now. I worried about the energy crisis. That has been transcended. We have our share of problems, but we are certainly healthier & wealthier than we were when I started to pay attention around 1970. You know the phrase is “healthy, wealthy and wise.” I do not think we have acquired much wisdom as a country and in fact maybe lost a little. The long prosperity did not make us so much complacent as resentful. It is odd in people so well off. We have magnified our little problems and they seem burden us more than some of the big problems faced by other generations. My father’s generation faced existential threats. They experienced real hunger in the Great Depression. Their world was almost destroyed in the great world war and they lived with the real threat of nuclear annihilation. Yet they persevered and gave us a fantastic legacy. Maybe it would make us happier to be more grateful and less demanding.

We don’t know how good we got it.

My pictures are not related to the story. They are the usual beer photos, plus around Washington

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What were you like when you were fifty – story worth

What were you like at 50? Story Worth question.

What was your life like when you were fifty?
The most significant thing that happened in my 50th year was that we bought our first tree farm. I have discussed the details of that purchase elsewhere, so let me talk here about the long thinking that went into that moment of spontaneity.

Forest people versus cabin people
I cannot remember a time when I did not love trees, but I never gave serious thought to owning a forest because it just seemed unrealistic. Who owns a forest? I was a city boy. I knew people who owned maybe a few acres. Chrissy’s parents were farmers and there was a lot of land on her side of the family, but they inherited those places. Just buying rural land was completely outside my experience.

At first, we were thinking “cabin.” Lots of people we knew had second homes in the woods. That seemed doable. We thought of West Virginia. The guy in the office next to me, Jeff, had a place in West Virginia. In fact, he had bought rural land several times. The more I talked to him, however, the more I came to know that that his experience would be more useful as a lesson on what to avoid rather than an example to follow. He had lots of experience buying rural land, but not much success keeping it.

Good neighbors
Jeff had trouble with his neighbors wherever he went. He warned me that rural people were “different.” Jeff was an FS classmate. I knew him well enough to suspect that the constant in all his bad neighborly relationships was him. Another classmate, Mark, had successfully bought – and kept – rural land near Appomattox. He loved his rural neighbors and they were helpful to him. We both knew Jeff and at lunch Mark told me that Jeff’s problem was that he did not meet his neighbors on their ground, figuratively as well at literally.

Jeff’s daughter fervently believed in animal rights. Evidently when Jeff bought land, he succumbed to his daughter’s entreaties and banned hunting on his land. This is not a smart idea in long established rural communities. Worse, he made his feelings clear to his neighbors, and his feelings were that they were not the friends of nature that he and his family were.

Funny, we diplomats know that we should treat foreigners with respect even when they disagree with us, but we often fail to understand we might want to show similar respect to our fellow Americans.

But Jeff’s advice was good in other ways. I don’t think I would have had the gumption to go through with my land purchase w/o Jeff. He did know how to buy land. It was Jeff who made me see that I was not a “cabin person.” I was a forest person. Cabin people like to fix things in the cabin. I do not. I don’t care at all about cabins, only the forest that surround them. I went looking for land where I could grow trees and do some real forestry. That was not West Virginia, BTW. It is too hilly. There are lots of trees in West Virginia, but not that much timber. Southside Virginia was the place to get timber.

Make haste slowly
I would like to claim that I was decisive, but I made haste slowly. The idea of buying land really came to me in earnest when we lived in New Hampshire, and I had been thinking about it years before that. I read about land going cheap after forest fires. So, the forest land purchase gestated for years w/o issue. It just got realistic around 2003.
There were other factors involved. I was a little worried about my career. (ALL foreign service officers worry about their careers all the time. Keeps us on our toes.) I thought that there was a good chance that the FS would kick me out, i.e. not promote me to senior FS. I wanted an alternative, and forest owner/manager seemed like something I could be proud of being.

Scared the shit out of me. Buying the forest was our biggest investment besides our house, and a foray into a lot less familiar territory. I figured the numbers. I did the due diligence. I went down and checked the land records. I looked at the soils and the trees, walked the boundaries. I checked the location of the mills. And after all that logic, I made an emotional decision and bought 178 acres of cut over land in Brunswick County because I really wanted to.

One of the things that made me more confident in the purchase was that the sellers didn’t seem to care about selling. When we looked at cabins in West Virginia, sellers wanted us to make a decision that same minute. Some even offered to take credit card for the down payment. Not so with this land purchase. When I called the guy in Brunswick to make an offer, he said that was good and that he would forward the paper work next week, since he was going fishing.

The dog that finally catches the car
I couldn’t believe I really had the land, and so much of it, too much to handle with my machete and shovel I took the kids down to see “their” new land. It was a very hot day and they were not as enthusiastic as I was to walk the length & breadth of the place, but they did it. I was lucky to have a hunt club using the land. Their “rent” pays the property taxes, but more importantly they provide a local connection. I got lots of good advice from hunt club members. They knew lots of things I wanted to know. Unlike Jeff’s experience, I found my neighbors exceedingly friendly and helpful.

Besides marrying Chrissy & having the kids, buying the forest land was absolutely, positively the best life decision I ever made.

Fulfilling the life’s dream
Becoming a forest landowner was the culmination of a life’s dream that I was not fully-aware I had. Forestry defines my values. I am never sure how much I am reading the past into the present. For example, did I “rediscover” my values in Aldo Leopold, or did I just think I did. I can look back at my life through the lens of conservation, but is this just hindsight bias? Since I know then end, am I recalling the events that “led up to it”?
I don’t know and never will know for sure. What I know for sure is that interacting with my land changed me. I feel responsible and connected nature in way I never did when before and it has given me a much deeper feeling for communities of all kinds, how they exist in both time and space. In the Aldo Leopold method, I can think, do, reflect and do something new based on what I learned. I have feeling of being of nature, not just a sojourner in it. Maybe I am fooling myself, but I feel it. I am reading all sorts of books and articles about land ethics, but I am also learning and connecting with the land itself and the biotic communities on it. It is a consuming passion in a good way.

Lots of things to do, even more to learn
We bought our first forest land in 2005. Got more in 2008, and more still in 2012. I have managed four harvests, planted more than 40,000 trees, got NRCS grants to plant pollinator habitat, contracted with hunt clubs, applied biosolids, thinned, burned, sprayed and protected stream management zones. People ask me if forest land is a good investment. It depends. All the things I did above, the actual work and the general contracting, I have wanted to do and enjoyed doing. Forest investment pays dividends in the joy of doing those things and being part of the land ethic. If you do not want to do that, it is not a good idea to own forests. It is like being a “cabin person” who doesn’t like to do fix-it. The payoff in joy is amazing but the payoff in money is paltry. I figure that I will “break even” about ten years after I am dead, but all that forestry has meant to me sure it worth a lot more. It connects me to the past and the future in a way I can more easily feel than explain. Best investment ever.

Had I never “invested” in forest land I sure would have more disposable income. Instead of tossing rocks, chopping vines and planting trees, I could be laying on a beach at some expensive resort, drinking margaritas and eating the best steaks. What a wasteful and boring life that would be.

Pictures are from the early years of our forest adventure. First is Espen on the back of the truck on the way to throw rip-rap. Next is our first forest when we got it. Cut over. Picture #3 shows Espen and Alex after spraying vines. Next is our beech woods. I think they are very beautiful. Last is completely different. He is an indigenous forester from the Amazon. We talked to him about planting trees. We were so separated in space and culture, but our feelings about trees and forests were remarkably similar.

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Describe the worst part of your life

Leaving out periods of sickness or bereavement, two periods of my life compete for “the worst.”

Crashing at the takeoff
It was the worst job year since the Great Depression. Unemployment in 1982 hit post World War II highs (think of it like the Great Recession, only worse) and I was not among those employers most wanted.  Sure, I could read Greek & Latin; employers were unimpressed. Who knew?  I thought I might never find a job outside the fast-food or hospitality industries.

I needed a change, a jump start.  Maybe I thought maybe I could join the Air Force, get some practical experience and maybe get them to pay for some practical education.  I was physically fit, college educated with no criminal history & I did well on standardized tests, so the recruiter saw me as a good prospect.  I got excited about officer training.  I saw “Officer & Gentleman” with Richard Gere.  I figured that I could do that. My plan was to marry Chrissy, go into the Airforce to become and officer and a gentleman.  The marriage was wonderful; the rest, not so much.

The shock came out of nowhere.  As I went through the steps, my blood pressure was excellent, my heart strong and everything was good.  I felt sorry for some of the guys around of me – the one with such high blood pressure that he had to lay down to lower it, the one with only one testicle (Evidently the rule was that you need two); the one humps on his back, kind of like an ankylosaurus. They all passed. Not me.

The doctor told me that I had some earwax and that I was not capable of military service.  Earwax? Turns out my “ulcer” from 11th Grade made me ineligible.  I protested that it – whatever it was – went away.  I was spectacularly healthy, as the tests showed.  I lifted weight, ran long distances and I ate and drank whatever I wanted w/o problems.  It didn’t have an ulcer. It didn’t matter. I was out.

It was like bouncing on the diving board and then seeing the pool was empty.  There was no plan B and no prospects.  I was an “employment refugee,” a ragged man wandering through a ragged landscape.  I worked episodically at “Flexi-Force,” doing things like stuffing newspapers on the night shift and sweeping floors. The idea was to get experience and maybe work into a steady job.  My MA in history meant less than nothing. My less educated co-workers were eager to tell me that we were in the same boat.  The difference was that I had spent years to get there and I had thousands in student loans. My best prospect for continued employment was selling phone service for MCI. I made a good impression on the boss, at least he said so, but I was gone after the temp period.

A good thing about being loosely connected to the job market is that you have time.  I studied for the GMAT and learned some of the math I needed for an MBA, and I took the Foreign Service written test.  The FS test was free and the study books for the GMAT did not cost much.  Things got better in the economy and for me.  I passed the FS written test and started an accelerated MBA program at University of Minnesota in the summer of 1983. They gave me a job as a TA, not sure why, sweet serendipity.

Management is a kind of applied history & even the math was sometimes fun, once I figured out the patterns.  When I took the FS oral exam soon after starting my MBA, I was completely relaxed. I had the MBA thing going for me, so the orals were just exercise.  That is probably how I passed.  Fortunately, the security background check took a long time and I finished my MBA before I got a call for FS. By then I was “director” of Marketing Research at Microdatabase Systems (MDBS). I put “director” in quotes, since I was the only one in the department.

MDBS made a wonderful data base software that was nearly impossible for non-experts. I learned the system with the help of the engineers and after a couple weeks the founders-owners called me. Nice guys. They asked me how I liked the product.  I told them truthfully that it was great but added that it was too hard to use.

The founders were taken-aback.  “If people are too stupid to use our product,” one explained, “perhaps they shouldn’t buy it.”  I figured I ought to flee that scene before it all fell down. I accepted the FS offer the next day. I had worked at MDBS for all of three weeks. Oddly, they asked me to stay on until I needed to leave for Washington, so I worked a couple more weeks, then set off for my new career.

Falling from the heights
The second dip was not existentially as bad.  I still had a good job. I was just worried that there was no future. I feel into the career pit right after the summit of my best of times in Krakow (discussed earlier).

The bureaucracy has no memory
Past accomplishments are no guarantee of future good treatment. The late 1990s were a time of cuts in the FS, especially in public diplomacy.  Lots of good officers were pushed out and those of us left had fewer opportunities.  I got a job at the Operations Center. This sounds exciting, but it was not, at least not for me.

Ops Center is 24-hour shift work. I never adapted.  I was sluggish most of the time, ate too much junk food, & gained weight. My blood pressure went up to “pre hyper tension.  My joints hurt. It was not only the shift work.  I thought my career was finished. I had done my best and ended up on the night shift – better than 1982 but similar time zone.  Our political leaders seemed uninterested in our work. Our USIA director at the time did not like people like me.  He thought the FS was too pale, too male and too Yale, and said so openly.  I had two of those three attributes. His team also emphasized youth. The under 30 crowd had some special attributes, they thought.  So, at 42 ½ I was too old, too pale, too male and maybe not Yale enough, since graduates of Midwestern state schools were lumped in but with none of the privilege or prestige of the Ivy League.

After he found he could not mess with the test to change his “elitist” workforce.  He did the next best thing – shrunk our numbers.  We hired almost nobody and promotions trickled down to almost none. We lost about 1/3 of our public diplomacy officers in those years.  I am convinced that one reason we were unprepared diplomatically after 9/11 was that we just did not have enough experienced boots on the ground, but that is another story.
I hated the Ops Center.  It was the only time in my FS life that I looked for another job.  Fortunately, I got another opportunity before I got too far in to the job search.  They needed someone in Poland to honcho public affairs for Poland’s perspective NATO membership.  I volunteered.  Fluent Polish speakers are not that common and/or not available in mid-year, so I was probably the only one available.  This shows the value of networking, BTW.  I spent a lot of time just talking to people.  I got the job because of my qualifications, but I knew about the job only because of my networking.

They sent me to Warsaw for three months with the mission to care for American academic & media delegations studying NATO. I believed then – and do today – in NATO.  I believed Poland would be a great addition and I worked to convince others to believe it too.  I took visiting delegations to Poland’s great universities and introduce them to Poland’s intellectuals and leaders – living treasures of Poland.  It worked. In a verified example, an editorial writer for the “Chicago Tribune” wrote me that his visit had changed his mind and his paper’s editorials.  I still have the letter.  All I did was make the truth available.  I believed in what I was doing, and I could devote a lot of time to my work, since I had nothing else to do. You can be very effective working full out, but probably cannot keep it up.

I had to go back to the Ops Center. Nothing changed and sill hated it. My work in Poland gave me visibility to get a job as desk officer for Russia and then press attaché for Poland.  You can tolerate almost anything if you can see the finish.  I spent just nine months in the Ops Center, closer to six months if you subtract my sojourn in Poland.

It reads better than it was lived
Looking back, my worst of times were not very bad, but they read better than they were lived. In the 1982 episode, I almost lost hope.  In 1997, I thought that the career that I had learned and loved had hit a brick wall.  In both cases, the despair was fueled by outside issues.  In 1982, it was the economy – stupid, but after that we enjoyed a quarter century of good times, which encompassed much of my working and investing life.  1997 was a more nuanced. We were being cut and the powers that be made it clear that they did not like people like me.  In both cases, the remedy was to adapt and overcome, but in both cases I was saved more by changes in climate than by my own actions. What I did to adapt was necessary to success, but not sufficient.

In the 1997 case, there is an interesting coda.  The 1990s were plague years for the FS.  Lots of good colleagues were pushed out of their jobs, especially at the 01 level.  As I wrote, we lost about 1/3 of our public affairs officers, and the carnage hit hardest at the FS-01 level.  After the end of the plague years, Colin Powell rightfully saw that we needed to rebuild.  His diplomatic readiness initiative brought in hundreds of new people above the attrition rate. They came in as junior officers. The plague opened the way for middle ranked (at the time) people like me.  As after a medieval plague, there were lots of empty spots to fill.  The hard times of the 1990s almost certainly delayed my promotion to FS-01, but likely created opportunities after that, so on balance the hard times were good.

For better and worse
The most important factor through these hard times was Chrissy.  I try not to comment too much about family, since I don’t think it is fair for me to tell their stories, but w/o her love and support I well might have got stuck in the swamp of despair.  Studies show that people with stable relationships are happier, healthier & wealthier.  I can well understand that. I talk a lot about sweet serendipity, but nothing is sweeter than that relationship.  It takes a lot of effort to be spontaneously lucky.

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What were you doing when you were 40?

My story worth for this week. What were you doing when you were 40?

I thought it was the best of times, and it was the best of times up to then. The worst of times was just around the corner, but I didn’t know it at that time and that is another story.
It was the middle of my time as public affairs officer in Krakow. It was the best possible job I could have had at my rank and I knew it. Poland was emerging from the darkness of communism and it was an amazing privilege and joy to be there to watch it, have a small part in helping it along. You could see the improvements week-by-week. The air was getting cleaner. Shops were opening and electricity was becoming more reliable. It was like springtime after a long, dark and dreary winter. And my work was rewarding. Opportunities were so thick that my only problem was deciding among them. I got rock-star reception everywhere I went. I liked to think it was me, but I knew that they really loved the America I represented and that was okay too.

My Polish was not great, but it got me what I needed. Polish is hard for English speakers & Poles were glad to hear Americans speaking their language. They seemed to have no problem understanding, but I think my accent was amusing. My nearest guess is that I sound like Pepe Le Pew. I often talked on radio or TV, so it was not an impediment. My best teacher was my driver – Bogdan. My district included the whole south of Poland. Visiting all the places I needed to go kept me on the road. Bogdan and I spent many hours driving together, so much so that my more educated staff members joked that I should not talk so much to Bogdan. I was starting to sound like a peasant, they said. I think it was a joke.

Representing the USA in those days opened lots of doors and gave me lots of work. In retrospect, I think that I worked too much, more precisely that I did not adequately understand the nature of diplomatic work. I should have focused on fewer priorities and applied more leverage to everything else. Good diplomats work through others. I did too much myself and did not let others do as much as they could. I don’t beat myself up too much on this. This is common behavior of mid-level officers. Later when I was the big boss, mentoring younger officers, I tried to explain, but they more often did what I did, not what I said. Maybe it is a stage we need to go through on the way to better understanding. There is a time for energy, after all. It was my job to tell them and their job to do something else. And even looking back with my greater experience, I still judge my time in Krakow was a great success, despite my youth and inexperience.

A few anecdotes from those times.

Espen was a little boy and he learned Polish, at least at the little boy level, but he would never speak Polish with me. He claimed he could not. I heard him speaking to the cleaning woman in fluent Polish, so I asked him about it. “I thought you could not speak Polish,” I told him. He answered, “I don’t speak Polish. Those are just the words I have to use with her.” What an insight! That is one reason why kids can learn language so well. What is language, after all? You make a series of sounds and something happens.

My funniest Polish radio interview had to do with Christmas traditions. The interview was going well. I thought we were talking about Christmas trees. I talked about the tradition of decorating them and how each family had their own traditions. The interviewer nodded. I went on to explain that some people go to the forest to cut their own trees. Suddenly, the interviewer looked very confused. We talked a bit more. Turns out that I was using the wrong word. The Polish work for tree is “drzewo.” I was using “drzwi,” which means door. Funny, that it made sense. You could – and some do – decorate doors. Had I not talked about the cutting; nobody would have been any the wiser. This is a caution when you are speaking a foreign language and everybody seems to understand.

One of my scariest times was when Richard Holbrook came to visit us. Holbrook was one of the smartest men I have ever men and seemed to me one of the scariest. I met him at the train station and introduced myself. He dropped his luggage and walked off. We always joke that diplomats need to be ready to carry luggage, so I carried his. I must have done a good job, because I was placed at his table for a reception are Ariel Café in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. It was a big table with lots of people well above my station. I laid low, not wanting to call attention to myself. Holbrook held forth on a variety of subjects. Seemed to know everything. I stayed quiet, speaking perfunctorily to the people near me, so as not to interfere with Holbrook, clearly the main event. The guy sitting next to me was the director of the Holocaust Museum. He was nice. We talked a little about the restaurant, which served traditional Jewish food and featured klezmer music. When we got up to leave, and made the usual goodbyes, the museum director was profuse in praise for the restaurant. I came to understand that he thought I was the owner of the café. I saw Holbrook at the other end of the table and I did not want to be explaining this when he might hear, so I just told the director that we try to please the customers.

On the dark side, Poland was a bloodland. Both world wars were fought over its territory and the Nazi occupation was very brutal. A casual walk in the woods will come across monuments to dozens of hundred of Polish civilians killed by Nazis. There were also remains of American pilots and aircraft. During the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the USA wanted to resupply the rebels. Stalin cynically wanted to let the Nazis wipe out the free Polish army.

Stalin would not resupply the Poles, nor cooperate with the USA to do it. American pilots and crews volunteered to drop supplies to the Polish Home Army. Since Stalin would not let them land in Soviet held territory, they had to try to make the round trip. Many did not make it. 1994 was the 50th anniversary of many of these events. I attended a quite a few memorials.

I was often assigned as site officer for Auschwitz. This is for official visits. The site officer makes sure everything is okay for an important visitor. I did some variation of these five times, including visits by Hilary Clinton and George W Bush. Each time I visited; it was worse. You notice more and more terrible details. My last visit was the worst. It was when George W Bush came to Poland. (This was a little outside the period in question. By then I was working in Warsaw, but they sent me south to help.) I went to the camp in the pre-dawn darkness and walked around the camp alone. Few people get to do this, and I do not recommend it. I will never, ever go back. The cruelty and inhumanity came stronger than ever, so powerfully that even as I write I am feeling physically sick. When people deny or minimize the Holocaust, well I wish I could infect them with this feeling. Well enough.

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Working in college

My Story Worth Question – Did you work in college?

I cannot say I worked my way through college, but I did work all the way through college. I put it this way working was necessary but not sufficient to pay for college. My father (when I was undergrad) and student loans (in graduate school) topped off tuition, but beyond tuition, I had to work to support myself. I think it is nearly impossible to work enough during college to pay tuition, but it is important to work enough to pay everything else.

In summers I worked at Medusa Cement, as I have written elsewhere. Let me concentrate on the in-semester work. Much of it was in the fast-food industry. I worked at Burger Chef, Burger King, the university cafeteria, an Italian restaurant in Madison & McDonalds.

Working at McDonalds
McDonalds was my last fast-food experience. I got that job in fall of 1977, when I started grad school at UW and kept it for six months. McDonalds was good for me because I worked the lunch rush and got a free meal. I was low budget in those days and that was my big meal of the day. McDonalds is a very hectic environment. I worked the front counter. In those pre-computer days, you had to take the order, remember the order, do the math as you filled the order and then ring up the total when you got back to the front. I learned that hamburgers always go in before fries. If they order a shake, you grab the hamburgers, start the shake, pick up the fries, pick up the now full shake and deliver it to the customer. I enjoyed the motion. It is like the Tao of movement. Don’t waste the motion. We also had to put the bills into the register with all heads facing up. It was a little thing, but good discipline. They don’t do this at McDonalds anymore and probably didn’t do it most other places then. Our McDonalds on Lake Street in Madison was one of the busiest in the world and all the workers were college kids or college graduates. College kids may not be able to maintain cars, but we could figure out how to deliver food. It helped that we tended to work only 3-4 hours at a time. We were not there long enough to get very tired.

Why did I leave that wonderful environment? Of course, it was not so wonderful, but I had other reasons. I got a job at the History Department delivering mail and doing odd jobs. I worked at that job about three hours a day. When added to three hours at McDonalds, I there was not much time to study. That was my theory. More on that below.

What does it mean to make fun of French fries?
But the proximate cause of my leaving McDonalds was a wage dispute. We got a 5 cent raise every couple of months. I was very fast at the counter and always cheerful. We used to have races, i.e. how much revenue you would have in the two-hour lunch rush. I was first or second most of the time. Time came for my first raise, and I got my nickel. The manager praised my speed. Time came for my next raise and they said no. I complained that I was doing a good job and deserved the raise. I asked what I did wrong. The response was that I had a bad attitude. When I asked for specifics, the manager said that was not serious enough. He mentioned an incident when he heard me making fun of the fries. What the heck does that even mean? Evidently, I joked that the large fries were not that large. I also never tried “up sell” products. He was correct about that.

Quitting over a nickel

Anyway, he denied me my raise and told me I could quit if I didn’t like it. So, I quit. He was surprised. It was just before the lunch rush and he asked me to finish. I asked about that nickel. He said he would not be pushed. I said neither would I and I left right then. I felt very empowered.

Quitting was not as a precipitous or brave move as it might seem, however I had been thinking about leaving because I figured that I could study more if I had only one job. I was wrong about that. I found that with all that extra time on my hands, I just procrastinated more. My study productivity declined, and my study output stayed about the same despite having an additional fifteen hours a week. Sometimes you can do less with more.

I had better jobs after that. As a research assistant, my job was to read Greek texts of Polybius and mark every time he used the work history. It was kind of a sinecure. Some of the motivation was to create work for me where I could better learn Greek. It was not as much fun as it would seem, and I do not think I did a great job. These days, a computer would make short work of it, and do it right. I was a teaching assistant during my MBA. Neither of these jobs was as nasty as McDonalds. They paid better and had higher status. My longest college time work was at Pick-A-Book in Madison. That is a whole different story.

My first picture shows where my McDonalds was on Lake Street. Next is the Capitol from UW.

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Three great teachers & a bottle of Coca-Cola

Who had the most positive influence on you as a child? This week’s Story Worth.

Of course, I would name my parents as the most positive influence on my life, and the gang of friends I grew up with shaped my personality, but these were more ongoing and generalized influences and I have written about them elsewhere, so let me mention on event and three great people.

Things go better with Coca-Cola for more than fifty years

One early inflection point, not really positive, is when I started regularly to drink Coca-Cola. I choose this because it has a date certain. It happened on February 23, 1964. We were at some kind of family party at my Aunt Florence’s house (I am less sure about the location than the date). The kids were relegated to watching TV. I wanted to watch “Scarecrow” on the Wonderful World of Disney. My cousins Barbara and Mary insisted on the Ed Sullivan Show. Seems that an obscure pop group from Liverpool was making its American TV debut. Who knew? The Beatles, as I recall the name. I got some Coca-Cola as a consolation. I liked it. Since that time, I have been a big consumer of Coca Cola. As an adult, I kicked into big time.

I have been drinking 2+ liters of the stuff each day for 30+ years. Coke hydrates, despite what you might have heard. When I was in Iraq, the Marines made fun of me for taking a supply of Coke with me on our dry desert sojourns. People say you must drink water; they are mistaken.

Great teachers at Bay View High
As for living influencers, I would mention three teachers – my swim coach Richard Czarapata, my English teacher Miss Reilly and my advanced biology teacher Mr. Hosler.

Coach Czarapata – the gift of lifelong fitness
Coach Czarapata kept me on the straight and narrow for my three years in HS. I admired his commitment to the sport I identified as my calling in HS. He always approached us with dignity and respect. The only time I thought that he dropped the ball was just after my mother died. He consoled me, as he should have done, but then he elided to the swim team. I would have appreciated his telling me that the team was there for me, and I am sure that is what he meant to say, but what he did say was something like, “I hope this will not effect your commitment to the swim team.” Too soon. I edited this in my mind, and it was okay.
Glen & Ken likely recall the Coach with similar fondness.

Miss Reilly – the gift of artful language
Ms. Reilly was my senior English teacher. She was one of those very old (very old = probably about my age now) maiden teachers, the kind you see today only in old movies. I was a poor student in an advanced English class full of better ones. I had the excuse that I see now that it was a tough year with my mother dying, but she did not know that. She was tolerant of my obvious failings and thought I was smarter than my record and my insouciance would imply.

I was an outsider in the class. Besides my less than stellar study habits, many of my classmates knew each other over longer periods. They were what we might today call higher achievers. When I ended up getting decent grades, there was a little surprise among some classmates. I did not perceive it, but Miss Reilly did. Suddenly, classmates got more friendly and supportive. I heard from colleagues that she has spoken to some of them, explaining how I managed to do okay. She told them that I had talent for putting ideas together in writing and that I had potential.

Not sure what else she told them, but it worked. I am sure that the more than the temporary bump in esteem among my classmates was the fact that Miss Reilly did it and what she said. That I got it second hand made it more credible and in retrospect helped add color to the map of what I thought was my skill set.

Phillip Hosler – the gift of becoming a conservationist
Finally, was my advanced biology teacher Phillip Hosler. He made a serious effort to mentor his students. A second year of biology was optional at Bay View, so everybody in class was there voluntarily. It showed in the enthusiasm, and the level of commitment. I felt more comradery with these classmates than in any other class. Mr. Hosler helped create this atmosphere. Mr. Hosler introduced me to Aldo Leopold, which influences me still. He arranged for field trips to natural areas around Baraboo. We spent a week on Blackhawk Island. He took us camping up in the north woods around Eagle River and he sent me and some classmates to a “Trees for Tomorrow” camp. It is the first time I used a dibble bar to plant trees. I also helped him dig a bog in his back yard. We visited Cedarburg bog and he wanted to make a small version in his own yard. As I recall, he lived in New Berlin. I had to ride my bike out there.

Cast a giant shadow
I can still feel the influence of these three teachers. I don’t much swim anymore, but I have kept a regular exercise program ever since those days. The habit stuck. Not sure how much writing I learned in Miss Reilly’s English class, but it was in that class that I first identified myself as a writer. It was an embryonic thought, one I can recognize only in retrospect, as I wrote above, the little stone that changed the course of the river. The Hosler legacy is perhaps the most evident, but I should point out that it flowed underground decades and would not have been evident.

We can see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants
None of us are self-made and I am grateful for all the help I got along the way. I did not keep in touch with any teachers from HS. Not sure if it would have changed anything. I graduated almost a half century ago and none of my great teachers were young back then. I don’t doubt that they have all long since shuffled off this mortal coil, but they are not forgotten. I wonder if any of them would have remembered me. I expect not but feel no regret about that. I am sure that each of them helped dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of young people like me. That’s enough accomplishment for one lifetime.

My first two picture are Bay View HS. Next is BV football field followed by a couple pictures of rain in Humboldt Park, just for balance.

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What was your first foreign trip? is my Story Worth for this week.

Jake and Mark Srnec

I am not sure why I got it into my head that I should go, but I opened a separate bank account, worked extra shifts at the bookstore, skipped meals and saved my money to pay a trip to Germany. Looking back, I am sort of impressed that I pulled it off. My preparations were inadequate. I had a youth hostel membership, so inexpensive places to stay. It needed to be inexpensive, since I didn’t have credit cards and besides the price of my ticket, I managed to save only a little less than $400. I thought that I could speak some German because of classes in HS and college. I had an okay accent, but my communication skill was mostly limited to asking where things were and ordering beer.

With the confidence of ignorance

The cheapest flights left from Chicago. I splurged on a bus ticket (rather than hitchhike) and caught the plane. My flight landed in Frankfurt early in on a June morning. It was exciting to be in a foreign country for the first time. I had a brief scare. My backpack was absolutely the last thing to come onto the luggage carousel. Then I left the airport. I saw German flags and heard everybody speaking a language I could sort of understand. There was a light rain. My response was – “shit, what have I done?” followed by despair and confusion. I think that I might have chickened out and gone home on the next flight, but my charter ticket was valid only 30 days hence. Since I could not go back, my best option was forward, so I went forward.

I had a map where I had drawn a route, a circuit through southern Germany and Austria. I wanted to go to Salzburg because I read a National Geographic article talking about its charm. I wanted to go to Munich because of the famous beer halls. I filled in along the way with stops that I figured were a short day’s distance and had youth hostels I thought I could find. My first stop was the university town of Heidelberg. This was the setting for “The Student Prince.” I never saw the operetta, but my mother had the album by Mario Lanza. This was the basis of my decision making in those days. I intended to stay at the youth hostel there and I figured on taking the train from Frankfurt.

I easily found the train station, successfully bought a ticket and got on the wrong train. I fell asleep almost as soon as I got on. After all, I had come in on an overnight flight and was tired. When I work up, I was going north when I should have been going south. When the conductor came by for tickets, he was puzzled and asked me where I thought I was going. I told him Heidelberg and he told me that this train would not get me there. I had to get off and go back. As I recall, the proper sentence “Ich habe den falschen Zug genommen.“ That seemed to work.

I got to Heidelberg. It was a delightful town. I probably should have located the youth hostel right away, but I was beguiled by a beautiful beech and oak forest on the way to the castle, so I went up the hill first. It was late by the time I was done, and I could not find the youth hostel, so ended up in a park and slept on a park bench. Nothing like being a bum on your first night. Nobody bothered me but there was a late-night incident. A drunk was evidently trying to take a crap in the bushes and crapped his pants. I heard him swearing and saw him walking off w/o pants. When the sun came up, I looked. Sure enough, there was a pair of pants full of crap – an inauspicious introduction to glorious Germany.

Under financed and looking for free rides
Germany was more expensive than I thought. I figured out that I did not have the money for the luxury of taking the train wherever I needed to go, so I hitchhiked. It was not too hard to get rides and it was fun to try out my German. Drivers were tolerant of my bad German. Surprisingly, I don’t recall anybody speaking to me in English, with the single exception below, even though most Germans speak English and my efforts with German must have been painful on their ears. My experience with hitchhiking, both in America and Europe, was that people who pick you up want to do most of the talking. Since it is their car, it is their option. I didn’t need to speak the language very well if I didn’t have to talk much beyond asking where they guy was going.

Only two of my rides still stick in my mind. The one was a guy with a BMW. He had fun showing how fast he could drive his powerful car on the autobahn. I noticed the speedometer getting up to 240 kilometers per hour. I was not sure how much that was in MPH (turns out it was 144 MPH), but I knew it was a faster than I wanted to go. I must have showed that. This made the driver happy. “hast du Angst”, he asked. I would not admit it, but I was full of angst and glad when he let me out.

The other ride I recall was on the way to Saltzburg. I noticed that the driver had an odd accent, but I figured it was a kind of regional dialect. Bavarian was hard to understand, and I figured he was speaking some variation of that. After around 15 minutes, he addressed me in English. Turned out he was French and did not speak German very well. He asked if he could speak English. Okay with me. Funny that both of us were laboring to speak a language that neither of us mastered.

Beware vampires
My strangest experience was on the way to Zell om Zee. This one was all my own imagination. It was hard to get rides Alps and I was out in middle of nowhere. (This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. “Big Lebowski” fans will understand.) Darkness was coming, so I just looked for a place to hide and sleep. I walked up a path and found a forest clearing and stretched out. Not long after it got dark, I started to think about vampires. This was not Transylvania but there were European mountains like in the scary movies. When you are alone in the dark, a stranger in a strange land, you think less clearly. I have been afraid of vampires since I watched Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” when I was around seven years old. I fashioned a cross out of some sticks, just in case vampires came by. None did. When the sun came up, I felt stupid, but a man’s reasoning is different in 2 am gloom than it is in the bright sunlight at 2 pm.

Who knows? Maybe the vampire never showed because of my preparations. Besides the vampire scare, this was a hungry time. Stores were closed or not available, so I had nothing to eat for a day & a half. I got to Zell am Zee the next afternoon. The youth hostel featured an evening meal, but I had to wait until evening to get it. When it finally came, I ate as fast as I could. I could tell food was not very good, but it tasted better than anything ever. I was sitting next to a Danish guy, who also seemed food deprived, judging by the speed of his fork. Coming up for a breath, he commented “hunger is the best cook.”

“We Danes are an ugly lot; you could be a Dane”
The Dane and I became temporary fast friends. Danes are generally nice people and the usually speak English very well. We were talking about the relative beauty of women from around Europe, and that extended to a more general discussion of national characteristics. My Danish friend thought that the most attractive people in Europe were people from Italy and Spain. Speaking about his own people, he lamented. “We Danes are an ugly lot.” Looking at me continued, “You could be a Dane.” I objected to “ugly” and “you could be” being so close together. He claimed to be referring only to my blue eyes and blondish hair. I still had hair in those days. I let it go. Danes, IMO, are attractive as a group. It is not a club I would reject.

Speaking of temporary friends, one of the fun things about solitary low-budget travel is the fellow travelers you meet and get to know. Everybody is lonely, so you make friends faster. I found it especially easy to get along with Australians. Australians were more like typical Americans than any other nationality in my experience. They were wonderfully practical, spoke a type of English and they liked to drink beer. (I prioritized beer over food, BTW. It was a good choice. Beer, after all, is liquid bread.) I quickly learned, however, that it was a bad idea to stay with Australians until the end of the night’s drinking. They tended to get into fights. Interesting how they could manage to insult people in languages they could not speak.

The funniest “friends” were a couple of Irishmen I met in Frankfurt. They were looking for their stuff. Seems they arrived in Frankfurt a few days before, checked into a pension and went out to get drunk. They were unable to find their lodging the next day. I walked around with them, as they hoped to recognize something. They had not found their stuff by the time we parted company.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose
If freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, I achieved freedom. I ran out of money the day before I was scheduled to leave, so I went to the Frankfurt airport a whole day early, since I had no place else to go and just hung around. I was very happy finally to get on the plane. Flying was a little classier in those days. You could get snacks more easily, and I ate enough to make up for the lean day before. Hunger is the best cook. The very big drawback to flying in those days is that they had smoking sections. I got stuck in the smoking section. The stewardess asked me if I would move so that a family could sit together. I foolishly agreed. I really hate cigarette smoke and I sat next to a guy who told me he was afraid to fly. He smoked to assuage his fear. This was a Lufthansa flight and they had free beer. I drank down several and was able to sleep despite the foul air. I woke up only for the food.

When I got home, I felt changed in many ways. Physically, I was lighter by around 15 lbs. My father said that I looked like a scarecrow, but I felt okay. I didn’t really see very much of the German attractions, since I was such a low budget traveler, but I was glad to have gone. I felt like a sophisticated world traveler. I appreciated Germany, but I also appreciated America more. Amerika, du hast es besser.

Coda
There is a two-part coda to this story. Chrissy & I went to Germany in 1989. We took the ferry from Oslo to Keil and then drove around. We had Mariza and Alex along this time. I was looking forward to going to all those nicer German places that I could not afford in my poor student days. Now we had more money, but we also had little kids. Little kids do not do well in nice European restaurants. We ended up eating at McDonald’s more often than I would have liked.

The second part of my story relates to language. When I got to Germany, I was surprised that I could still speak and understand German. In fact, it seemed even easier than before. So, I happily spoke to people and usually got what I wanted. We were down in southern Germany when I got a clue. I was talking to a woman at breakfast in a language that I thought was German. Finally, she asked me – “That language you are speaking. It is very much like German and I understand most, but what is it?”

I had learned Norwegian before taking my post there. Norwegian has lot of words like German. What I think happened was that I was simply mixing the languages, sometimes doing Norwegian with a German accent and sometimes the other way around. It was very fluent, which is why the woman thought it was a language, but it was something of my own inadvertent creation. I guess that is how creole languages develop.

Post script
Notes from my more recent Frankfurt visit
My visit to Germany was in 1979 – my pre-camera days. I spent a day in Frankfurt on my way back from Iraq and have some pictures from then. The place did not change, but I had enough money for good food and drink.

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What do you want to do when you retire? is this week’s Story Worth question.

This question comes a little late, but it is something I thought about for a long time and that I am now implementing. I am doing what I wanted to do when I retired.

Knowing when to leave your life’s work
I was eligible to retire in 2005. It was nice to know that I could go, but I wanted to stay. I felt unfinished. Career was going okay, but not remarkable. FS has an up or out promotion system. I had until 2009 to get promoted. I had opted to ‘open my window”, early which makes you eligible for senior promotion but risks the boot.I was afraid that I would not make it and they would kick me out, but I didn’t want to take the jobs most “career enhancing.”

Multiple identities
I was just confused, but I did have one good plan, a back to the roots plan. I was going to diversify into forestry. If they kicked me out of the FS, I would have another identity as a forest guy. Forests were my first passion, predating FS, predating almost everything after I learned to ride a bike. I dreamed of owing forest land. I deferred that dream. I thought maybe forever, but then I had a chance.

Sweet serendipity
Most of my success comes from sweet serendipity. This was no exception. When I was ready to buy forestland, tax law changed to make big paper companies ready to sell. Tracts of land were available all over the South. Chrissy was wonderful. She let me mortgage the house and we got our first forest land. I told her that I could not promise it would be a great investment, but I would not buy unless I could figure out at least how to break even.
Who knew how to buy forest land? I guessed that Internet did and started to research. I learned that the difference between having some trees and having timber was distance from mills and that the best place to own timber was in Virginia’s Southside. Much of the land was worn out by generations of tobacco, corn and cotton, but pine trees grew very well. I zeroed in on Brunswick County and went looking.

How silly I must have seemed – a city-boy Yankee who works for the government, driving a Honda Civic Hybrid in the land of Ford F150. But people of the South are very friendly and I am very lucky. One advantage was that I knew a little about trees and soils. I could identify trees and when the real estate agents showed me crap dirt, I could tell that too. They came to give me a modicum of respect.

In retrospect, I see that I paid more for the land than a savvy local would have done, but a lot less than a city slicker like me deserved. I ended up buying the land that the real estate agent really didn’t think I would buy. I am pretty sure that he showed me a cut over rutted place to contrast it with nicer looking places. But I noticed the little loblolly pines were firmly established in good dirt. The internal roads were okay and we had some blacktop frontage. It looked like crap, but I could imagine how it would be in a few years and that was beautiful. I have never regretted it.

Now I had two definers in my life. I was a diplomat and a forest owning conservationist. Proud of both.

Don’t hang around like a fart in a phone booth
To my surprise – and likely that of others – they promoted me to senior foreign service and then promoted me again to the next level. That meant I could stay until I was 65. Always leave when they still want you to stay, rather than hang around like a fart in phone booth. I put in my retirement request the same day I got my formal notification of promotion. The HR folks were surprised.

By that time, more than ten years after I was first eligible to retire, I felt I had done what I could in the FS. My last decade was my best one. It would have been a shame to leave with those songs unsung.

I got to do a year in Iraq. An an active war zone is not fun while you are doing it, but it is great to have done it. I was glad that I stepped up when it was my turn. Another factor was my second posting in Brazil. Brazil was my first post. I never felt I did a very good job because of my inexperience and poorly developed skills. Going back a second time let me pay back.

It was also great to relearn Portuguese. I got better than ever and fell in love with that beautiful language. Brazilian Portuguese is subtle and graceful – excuse the cliche – like a samba. Anyway, I felt I did better the second time, closed the loop.

The career capstone was really cool job as Senior International Advisor at Smithsonian. Does it get better? Time to go.

So it goes
Retirement has been better than I planned, even better than I hoped. I have been able to keep being a sometime diplomat. I got a temporary assignment in São Paulo and got to use my Portuguese. I got an assignment on the Columbia River Treaty and got to work with water, trees and tribal lands. There are good chances for other such work. I get the satisfaction of diplomacy w/o the anxiety of needing to work toward career goals.
My forestry work has been fantastically rewarding. I just feel good in the forest. It is existential. Being in the woods is not a means to an goal. It is the goal. I never get tired of it. Planning for the forest future is an added benefit. Now add on working with others passionate about forestry as president of the Virginia Tree Farm Foundation, member of the board on the Forest History Society, & active participant in our Virginia branch of longleaf restorers. I get to study (and sometimes start) prescribed fires, as well as attend professional conferences and meetings. Lots of the skills I use in the outreach are like those I learned in diplomacy, but now I do it in my own service.

Living in Washington is a big advantage for a gentleman of leisure. There are lots of lectures and events to attend. I attend lectures or events 2-3 times in an average week. Topics and speakers are interesting, and you usually even get free coffee, sometimes a free lunch. Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Chrissy and I have also set up a “donor advised fund” to plan & regularize our charitable giving. A big part of the good life is giving. It so enriches the life of the giver that it might even be considered a little selfish.

Busier than ever?
Retired people sometimes say that they are busier than ever. This is rarely true. But you do need to plan your time better. When you work, you spend 8-10 hours every day working or commuting to work. It sucks your time, but you know where you are going to be most days. Retired people need to plan where they will be. I need a planning calendar more than I did when I knew I would be at work every day.

All good things must come to an end. I know that these halcyon days too will pass. I will not live forever and will likely not be in such good health for all the rest of my life. Sic transit gloria mundi. I hope that when my time comes, I go gracefully, much like my retirement, go while they still want you to stay. I hope that is some distance in the future. Living for now, I am a happy retired man, mostly doing what I think I should, seeking eudaimonia.

My first picture is from 2005. I am standing in front of some tree of heaven, an invasive that I have been fighting ever since we saw them. Notice the hard to see little trees just to the right. They are the bigger trees in the background in picture #2 and #4. The second picture is where the tree of heaven used to be. We made that into a meadow, a pollinator habitat. Picture #3 is the Brodnax place. #4 is Diamond Grove road, We own both sides. On the left side are those little trees from 2005, bigger now. Last is pollinator habitat again.

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How did you rebel?

This week’s Storyworth is “How did you rebel as a child?”

The short answer is that I did not. My parents were very liberal (in the real, not political sense). Their rules made sense most of the time and did not have much reason to rebel. As mentioned in an earlier post, I was on swim team in HS, so I was always working out or tired during prime rebellion years.

I did, however, get crazy when I went away to college at University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. It was a very stressful time for me. I see that much clearer in retrospect that I did back then. Things started inauspiciously and went downhill. I was sick my first couple weeks at UWSP. Not sure what I had, but I was tired and achy all the time. I went out for swim team, but I was not good enough for college level, so one of the big things in my life was gone like the snows of last winter. I was going away from home for the first time. Neither my father nor anybody else I knew well had experience with going to college. My mother had died the year before, so I lost her stabilizing love. AND in Wisconsin at that time you could drink beer at age 18, and that was one thing I was good at doing.

I was lost and I fell in with others who were feeling some of the same things. We drank a lot and improvised all sort of games to enable us to drink more. I did not study, and I started skipping classes. My logic was simple. When I thought about what I learned in class, I could not think of very much, so I thought I could just wing it. I was mistaken. I got a 1.6 GPA my second semester, but still managed to make just above 2.0 for first year because of a few easy classes in the first semester. Bad as my grades were, I think they were the best of my group of drinking friends. None of them made it to graduation.

The nadir of my existence was my second Freshman semester to the middle of my first sophomore one. My only significant achievement was what I think was the streaking record. My friends & I ran naked through the Wisconsin campus in March. Streaking was a big deal for a little while in the early 1970s. It was a kind of social thing. Large crowds would gather to “welcome” streakers, and a couple dozen of us were out running that night. You can see the attached report from the local newspaper. I am the guy on the right of the screen, bandana but no hat. Never sure how to describe left and right on a screen, but I know for sure it is me because I got full-length photos from the newspaper photographer. I still have one, but I will publish only the newspaper version.

Early March is cold in Wisconsin. The ground is hard and frozen, with patches of ice and snow. I had a pair of hiking boots. I did not own a pair of running shoes in those days and I did not want to run in my boots, so I ran with socks but no shoes. It is hard for me today to put myself into that stupid kid mind-set, but I have pictures. We were caught and when I went to see the dean, he was less angry than impressed that we could tolerate the cold for so long. I recall he made a comment about freezing body parts; he was not referring to our toes.

We got in surprisingly little trouble for streaking. Some things were better back then. I got some kind of probation. Campuses were wilder in those days. This was 1974, although technically part of the 1970s, this was still the last gasps of the 60s in campuses. 1973-4 was in fact a cusp year. That was the year of the Arab oil embargo, the beginning of the energy crisis and the end of the post-war boom America had enjoyed for nearly the last three decades.

There had been no really hard times since before I was born. None of us baby-boomers could remember a time when America was not booming and getting richer. Now the American economy went to hell and did not properly recover until 1983. This changed the campus mood from one of carefree optimism (we all just assumed we would get good jobs no matter our academic record) to a careful pessimism (none of us would ever be as well off as our parents). Kids began to study harder and the era of competition had begun.
I considered dropping out of college between my freshman and sophomore years. I remember a particular day at my summer job at the cement factory. I was by myself loading bags on a small truck. The truck driver was not required to help, and this guy did not, but he did talk at me while I carried the bags. He asked me how I liked the job. I told him that I really hated it, but I needed the money for school. He asked me if it was worth it. Thinking back at my previous failures and prospect of not much better, I told him that I just didn’t want to be loading bags every day for the next 30 years. I recall that h made some nasty comment, although I don’t recall what. I decided to go back in the fall, more from inertia than design. I had almost wasted a year, but I did manage to “earn” 32 college credits, albeit with bad grades that haunted me when I applied to graduate school.

I do not regret it, however. I learned how to fail and to come back from failure. If you need that lesson, UWSP was a benign place to get it. My experience is one big reason I believe so strongly in second chances and redemption. A reasonable person would not have given a nickel for my prospects in the summer of 1974, but I turned out okay.

My “rebellious times” ended abruptly in my in the middle of my sophomore year. There were a few reasons. I got a girlfriend who was less impressed than were my drinking buddies by my remarkable capacity to drink a load of beer, throw up, and then come back for more. Girlfriends are big civilizing influences on crazy young men. I also was losing my drinking friends, as they started either to drop out or start studying, mostly the former. But maybe the big reason was just aging out of the wild times. A young man of twenty is just very different from a young man of eighteen. Our brains start to complete.

My grades turned dramatically. I was also very lucky in one particular class and professor that I see as an inflection point. I had never learned to write a research paper and the prospect terrified me. I was supposed to write a paper for a course on the history of the tribes of the American west that I liked a lot. I participated a lot in class and the professor seemed approachable, so I approached and told him of my fears of the research paper. I do not recall exactly what he told me, but it was something like, “you are not as dumb as you think you are.” He suggested that I do something on the Blackfeet of Montana and how the arrival of horses around 1730 changed their culture. He had done field work with the tribes and was excited by their history. He lent me a book called “the Horse in Blackfoot Culture” to get me started. I agreed that this was a truly exciting topic and I set out to find out how to write a research paper. Maybe the professor was generous. Maybe it is because my sister Christine Matel Milewski typed the paper for me and fixed my egregious spelling. But he gave me an A on the paper. I started to expect that I should just do that more often. I did and never again felt the need to rebel.

More correctly, I learned to rebel all the time w/o creating trouble, but that is a different story.

My first picture is my streaking. I am on the right of the screen. Running with me is my friend Gary and you can see Dan cheering us on. Good times.

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Have you participated in any competitions? How did you do?

Have you participated in any competitions? How did you do?
It is not too much to say that swim team was what I cared most about at Bay View HS. It ordered my life.  I was a good natural swimmer and swam varsity my first year. This was unusual.  Not that good. I did not get a major letter my first year.  But I was good enough that I could cherish reasonable aspirations.

The reason I swam varsity was that we had a meet at an eight-lane pool.  That meant the junior varsity (me) got to be in the same pool as the varsity.  I swam 400-Freestyle for the first time. To my surprise and that of everybody else, I came I second.  One of the guys from the other team won the race, but I came in ahead of everybody else, including our two varsity swimmers.   This outcome did not delight my varsity teammates.  Our lead swimmer for the 400-Free was a guy called Rutowski.  He was good looking and extroverted, inordinately proud of his wash-board abs and incredulous that a skinny wimp like me could come in ahead.  The varsity coach, a guy called Czarapata (yes lots of odd names) had never much noticed me.

The consensus was that I was just lucky Swimming is not a sport where luck plays a big role, but every sport, every human activity, has a social dimension.  I stayed on the Junior Varsity for a couple more meets, but as my times were faster than those of the “starters” the coach finally displaced one of them and swam varsity but remained JV. That is why I did not get that major letter.

Rise of the Machine
In all fairness, it was easy to miss me in the crowded practice pool.  I was introverted, so I did not push myself forward. I had a clumsy and thrashing form while swimming.  We did not have swim-offs.  Rather the coaches assigned you to a race based on their judgement of your potential.  My first assignment had been the 100-butterfly.  I never learned to do that stroke well, so I usually came in 4th in a field of four.  I guess I had done so poorly that they stuck me into 400-free, which was not a popular distance.  In the meet mentioned above, I had never swum that fast before over that distance, but I just kept on going because I wanted to keep up with the faster guys.  My teammates gave me the nickname “the machine” because of my persistence.  I was proud of that.

The beauty of not knowing the challenges
My times were improving fast. Since I did not understand math very well and never heard of the law of diminishing returns, I determined that I should get the school record in 400-free.  It was an old record; as I recall from 1953.   I figured I could knock it off within a couple years.  Ignorance is bliss.

This would not happen w/o effort. This I did understand.  So I went to library and got a book called “The Science of Swimming” by a guy called James Counsilman. Coach Czarapata talked about this book.  The coach did not notice me, but I listened to him.  I read the book very carefully and made up a plan that included off-season swimming and weight lifting.   I lifted weights every day for the next three years, taking off only when I was preparing for a meet or seriously ill.  I did endurance even days, 300 reps, and strength on odd days.  It worked.  When I came back to swim practice the next year, I was much more muscular and much faster the first time out.  Coach Czarapata noticed me.

Tragedy
I woulda, coulda, shoulda got the school record that year, but I had a serious problem.  I coughed up blood and the doctor said it was an ulcer. He said I should not do so much as a pushup if I wanted to get better. I think it was a misdiagnosis, since I never had an incident since.  The diagnosis did, however, keep me from joining the Airforce ten years later and stopped me from swimming during the crucial time in my second year.  I recovered after a few weeks, too late to make a good season.  It was the biggest tragedy in my young life, I thought.

I worked out even harder after.  During that summer of 1972, I went swimming every non-raining morning at Kosciuszko Park swimming pool.  It would have been a perfect summer, followed by a winning season, but my mother died.  Now THAT was the biggest tragedy of my young life.  My mother had been very proud of my swimming success.  I thought I should carry on and I did.  Only in hindsight do I see the profound effect that had on me, but that is another story.

The best year ever
The swim season went well, the best Bay View had done for a long time, maybe forever. We won ALL our dual meets that year and I won all my dual meet races, except one, and this is ironic.  We had a meet with Marquette University HS, not one of our usual public-school competitors.  They had a really fast guy in the 200-free and 400-free.  They said I could not beat him, and they were right.  It was in my home pool and I tried hard to get ahead and then just keep up, but he was faster.  So, I was surprised when my teammates seemed happy and congratulated me when I – defeated – pulled myself out of the water.  I beat the Bay View school record, even if this guy now held the pool record.

I never did better.  In the Milwaukee city tournament, I missed my first flip turn and ended up in third place.  I have always referred to that as my “Freudian flip,” since it gave me an excuse to lose.  There was never question about doing well in Wisconsin state meets.  Milwaukee boys never won. We were not good enough.  Kids in the suburbs were on teams since they were little kids.  We started competition when we were in 10th grade. We never caught up.

There is small compensation that my swim record was never bested.  A few years later, the swim competition went to 500-free.  The first person to swim that won the record, but he did not beat me.

Sic transit gloria mundi
My swim team experience was a passing but very important part of my life.  It kept me out of trouble in HS. I was so concerned with my training that I never drank booze, smoked or took drugs.  I became interested in improving my diet and I learned how to set achievable goals. Nothing I learned in HS was as crucial to my future as was the swim team.   I got the record in the 400-free, shared the record in the 400-free relay and was co-captain.  Not too bad. But after a few years, it didn’t really matter if I won or lost.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

A son’s need for his father’s approval
My father was less interested than my mother in my swimming. He thought sports were a little … dumb.  But he did come meets twice.  He came to the city relays and to the city championship.  I like to think he was proud of me, but his comment was interesting.  In the city relays, we swam against Boys’ Tech. They were the perpetual champions, since they literally had twice as many boys as anybody else – a bigger field to choose from.  I was the third leg in the 400-free relay.  We were behind when I jumped in. I caught up and passed the Boys’ Tech swimmer.  Although we lost in the last leg (they had a great guy), for a brief shining moment it looked like somebody would beat Boys’ Tech.  All the other teams were cheering for us.  As I got out of the water, I was mobbed by joyous teammates and members of other teams. I still recall the elation.  When I met my father after the meet, he said simply, “You did okay.  I didn’t know you could swim like that.”