1990s

The kind of guy who could save America

Dave Farquhar Society , , , , , , ,

I went to several estate sales today (it’s what I do on Saturdays, after all), but one was memorable. Some sales just jump out at you, and this one had evil genius/mad scientist written all over it.The estate belonged to a man named Carl. From what I could gather, Carl was Catholic, diabetic, and from my wife’s comments, must not have been married at the time he died. She mostly stayed upstairs while I rollicked around in the basement, which was tinkerer’s heaven.

“This guy was just like you!” my wife marveled when I resurfaced once. Well, she’s half right. I very much would have liked Carl. And yes, Carl liked computers and models and trains and didn’t see any point in buying anything he could make himself. But Carl’s knowledge of physics and other sciences went far, far beyond mine, as did his knowledge of electronics. I pulled out box after box after box of electronic components. Some of the stuff was pretty new, and some of it obviously dated to the early 1970s, if not earlier. It pains me to think most of that stuff is going to get thrown away, but there’s no sense in me buying it, even for pennies on the dollar, when I don’t know what it is, let alone what to do with it.

It’s entirely possible that Carl and I did cross paths, sort of. In the 1980s and early 1990s, BBSing was a common hobby among people who enjoyed electronics, amateur radio, and computers. People exactly like Carl. For that matter, it’s possible he might not have just dialed into BBSs, he fit the stereotype of a BBS operator like a hand in a glove. Who knows, maybe Carl ran a BBS I used to call.

Digging around Carl’s work area, I found lots of different things. I bought some moldmaking supplies and casting resin, Bondo body filler, and some tools. Carl took care of his tools. But on his workbench, I found a single file laying there that still had metal shavings on it. Perhaps Carl died before he was finished with it and cleaned it. I found a brush, cleaned off the file, and could picture Carl looking down, nodding approval. I bought the file and the brush. Both were better than the ones I owned previously.

Unfortunately, Carl is the type of person our society has been trained to fear, rather than respect, especially during this decade. I found plenty of literature that Homeland Security wouldn’t approve of. Instructions for making Tesla coils, and lots of instructions for making things that go boom in the back yard. I also found literature that dealt with alternative car fuels, converting cars to electric power, and generating your own electricity.

He was also obviously very interested in robotics and using computers to control things. In a spare bedroom, I found a pile of old Timex Sinclair 1000 computers and peripherals. He added I/O ports to most of them, and hacked another one to use a Texas Instruments keyboard instead of the cheap membrane keyboard that came with it. He must have used that Sinclair for programming. Another spare bedroom had a couple of barely started robotics projects.

Unfortunately, many people look at people like Carl, and are too quick to label him a deviant, or worse yet, a terrorist. The label is unfair. In fact, during natural disasters, amateur radio operators often are the people with the best information early, giving invaluable information to relief workers.

But the most important thing is the tendency not to think within the boundaries that “normal” people usually confine themselves to. Among his things, I found a book titled How to Patent Your Ideas.

Now I don’t know what kind of ideas he had floating in his head. As far as I can tell, he never published any of them (I have his last name, and I searched out of curiosity).

But with all this talk today about energy independence, I think it’s great that some guy in Crestwood, Missouri was thinking along those lines. I don’t know if any of those thoughts turned into anything tangible or not. But frankly, that kind of work is important–much more so than the tinkering I’m doing in my basement, which so far has resulted only in some wooden toys for my son to play with, and metal toys for me.

We need some new ideas, rather than just buying everything from abroad. I know there are still people like Carl out there, but I hope they aren’t a dying breed.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a sudden desire to go see what I can do with some of the tools I bought from Carl’s workbench.

How far we’ve fallen

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

It’s job interview time again. I haven’t lost my job, at least not yet, but I’m not waiting around to see if I’m going to. I’m hitting pavement, talking to potential employers, whether they’re connected to what I’m doing now or not.

So, it was off to the mall to buy some clothes this weekend for the interview because all my dress clothes are from 1991. They fit (I wore them to my last interviews in 2005), but when your clothes are old enough to vote, it’s probably time for something new.What I found at the mall was depressing. There were lots of vacancies, including places I remember having something the last time I was at the mall. That might have been October, but October isn’t that long ago. And I’m not talking as someone who owns clothes that are old enough to vote. In business, October is yesterday. I’m still dealing with projects at work that started around then.

I also found people with college degrees working retail. Not 2-year degrees. I’m talking 4-year degrees from good schools.

At a job fair today, someone scoffed at my journalism degree. Frankly I’m getting tired of apologizing for my journalism degree, especially from people who wouldn’t know how to spell "journalism" correctly, or at least don’t know that paragraphs generally have more than one sentence in them. Engineering isn’t the end-all of life. And a journalism degree from the University of Missouri isn’t a cakewalk. It’s one of the top three schools in the country, and there’s a reason for that: It’s hard.

And I won’t apologize for it because that degree allowed me to write an O’Reilly book at the age of 24.

I also won’t apologize for it because if I’m not deemed worthy to keep the job I’ve been doing for three years, I should be able to make enough as a freelance writer to keep the utilities on and keep food in my son’s stomach without being a burden on the taxpaying public.

And finally, I won’t apologize for it because I’ve survived in this industry since early 1997, in spite of having a degree in a seemingly unrelated field. In the mid 1990s, no four-year university was teaching what I do. Want to guess what the best sysadmin I’ve ever met majored in? Interdisciplinary studies. That’s a polite way of saying "nothing." But the people who come from all over the country to hear him speak couldn’t care less what he majored in.

But I’ve gotten off track. I guess I’m in a bad mood because this week I also had to sit in a meeting where I listened to someone tell 20 people that they won’t be retained, and 20 temporary employees who’ve been with the company for a month will be retained, "because they’re doing a helluva job."

No, those temps will be retained because they’re cheaper. The people in that room have busted their butts for that company for years. But in some cases, the management doesn’t even know those people’s names or job titles, in spite of the number of years and long hours they put in.

Of course you don’t want to let a temp go. You shouldn’t want to let anyone go. But that’s always a risk when you’re a temp. I was a temp twice. Once I was let go myself. The second time they kept me, but let go another temp from the same company who started the same time I did. And I knew from the start that it was a possibility.

But I think the thing that depressed me the most was seeing the long lines at that job fair, where I applied for my current job and tried not to show offense when someone ridiculed my journalism degree. The majority of people who showed up at that fair won’t get jobs. And you could tell from the looks on their faces that a lot of them knew that. But what else were they going to do? They had to try.

I don’t know how much longer this is going to last. A local economist on the news Sunday morning said he expected 6-18 months. That means he thinks things will be bad at least until July 2009, and perhaps as long as July 2010.

And from what I can tell right now, my best bet for recession-proofing my career is Sun Solaris 10. Should I find myself with ample free time in the near future, I’ll probably try to spend a lot of it learning that.

Pale Divine: St. Louis’ biggest band

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , , , ,
Pale Divine: St. Louis’ biggest band

“[Pale Divine singer Michael Schaerer’s] life didn’t turn out the way fans expected, but chances are neither did theirs.” Perhaps nothing sums up Pale Divine, St. Louis’ biggest band in 1991, better than that line from the December 21, 2008 issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In the early 1990s, Michael Schaerer was the frontman for Pale Divine, a local band on the verge of breaking onto the national scene. They played sold-out shows on Laclede’s Landing, they had a record deal with Atlantic Records, and the radio stations even played some of their stuff sometimes. And then they broke up before they could finish a second album. For years, Schearer got solo gigs playing cover tunes, though he’s raised his profile in recent times. His former bandmate, guitarist Richard Fortus, is in Guns ‘n Roses. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

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How to turn around an automaker

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , ,

So if you’re a CEO of one of the Big Three automakers, you have to fly a private plane, as corporate policy, for safety reasons.

Congress suggested they save money by flying first class, or plane-pool at the very least.I guess the problem with flying first class is that they might run into some angry shareholders. And maybe one or more of those angry shareholders would recognize them and beat the snot out of them?

But that raises another question. Speaking as someone who lost a lot of money in Ford stock (but back in 2000 or so, so don’t cry too hard for me), how many of those shareholders would have enough money left to fly first class? The angry mob would have to be sitting in coach, right?

But seriously. There’s a lot wrong with the three domestic automakers and cutting the corporate jets isn’t going to fix the problem, at least not alone. But let me tell you a story.

In the mid 1990s, I was briefly the treasurer of a student organization while I was in college. My organization had a serious cashflow problem. At midyear, I estimated the remaining expenses for the year based on bills from the first half, and came to the conclusion that we were spending more money per member than we were taking in.

I made this startling discovery by dividing the amount of money we were spending by the number of members we had. It was a bigger number than the amount of money we charged to be a member of the group.

Sure, it’s sixth-grade math, but someone had to do it.

The problem was that I faced a room full of good-ol’-boy, stubborn German Lutherans, some of whom had difficulty doing sixth grade math, and I just couldn’t convince them what we needed to start charging more.

I couldn’t balance the budget by cutting things, but I figured being $100 short at the end of each month was better than being $200 short. And I knew it would get my point across. So I started slashing line items like the stingy Scottish miser I am (and was). Cable TV? Gone. Telephone service? Gone. But most importantly, everything related to parties and beer got cut. That sure got the good ol’ boys’ attention. After all, the only thing more important to a German Lutheran than stodgy hymnals and poorly maintained pipe organs is beer.

When I refused to sign any checks related in any way to the annual Super Bowl party, I got the changes I needed in the budget. They got a slightly cut-down party, and I got the bank account balance back up above zero. This was a compromise, because I wanted to have a surplus at the end of the year. You know, just in case anything broke sometime and needed to be fixed or replaced.

Sometimes you make cuts in the budget not because it’ll balance the budget, but because it sends a message.

If I were the CEO of an auto company, I’d get the rules changed so I could fly in commercial aircraft. I might even go so far as to fly coach. And I’d get rid of those planes.

I’d also get rid of the executive cafeteria. Bob Lutz argued in one of his books that the executive cafeteria isn’t just a perk, it’s a great place to get work done. The problem is the message it sends. I’m not an auto executive, but somehow I manage to get my fair share of work done over a microwaved lunch from Costco that I bring from home every day and eat at my desk.

Incidentally, my boss eats lunch at his desk too.

I don’t need to eat gourmet food provided by the company behind locked doors in a lavish room to be productive. And if you do, you’re not creative enough.

I’d go even further than that, though. I read that Rick Wagoner made $14 million last year. A $14 million salary suggests that you’re the executive of a successful and growing company. Rick Wagoner is not. Time for another story.

In 1997, there was a struggling computer company in Cupertino, California. This struggling company merged with another struggling company, one that specialized in trying to sell underperforming, overstyled computers that ran Unix. I say trying because nobody was buying.

It wasn’t long before the CEO of the struggling company departed, and the erstwhile CEO of the company he bought became interim CEO.

The interim CEO gave himself a base salary of $1. One lousy dollar. The bulk of his compensation came in bonuses and stock options. I don’t know exactly what his motivation was, but it tied his yearly compensation to performance.

It worked. Prior to his taking the helm, pundits had the company on a deathwatch. I don’t have to tell you how the company is doing today or how it got there. All I have to tell you is the name of the company was Apple, and the executive was Steve Jobs.

I don’t know if Apple would have turned around if Steve Jobs had taken a more traditional compensation package. But it’s safe to say that Jobs is highly motivated. And while I personally don’t care much for the products his company makes, he’s obviously successful.

Taking a page or two from Apple’s book seems like a good move for car companies, starting with executive compensation. How Apple manages to remain highly profitable and successful with a market share of around 10 percent would also be a good case study for U.S. automakers, since it’s clear they’re going to have to live with a smaller market share than they’ve been used to having, at least for a time.

Turning the Big Three around isn’t going to be an easy process, and it’s going to take a lot more than a $25 billion loan from the government to get it done. A true turnaround is going to require a change of culture, lots of shared sacrifice, and the motivation to think long term, far beyond the next quarterly report.

Changing things like corporate jets and corporate cafeterias won’t balance the budget, but it’ll help in the shared sacrifice and changing the corporate culture.

And in the long run, maybe some of those perks can come back some day. I don’t know this for certain, but I’d be willing to bet Steve Jobs doesn’t eat lunch at his desk.

So what now?

Dave Farquhar Politics , , , ,

The Republican Revolution is over. What went wrong?

Before I try to answer that question, a few words by Dr. Donald Prahlow, my high school history instructor, seem pertinent. In 1992 when Bill Clinton took the White House, Dr. Prahlow stood in front of a classroom full of young, mostly right-leaning students and tried to make sense of what happened. "As a historian, I have to say the best thing that can happen, when one political party has been in power for a long time, is to hand power over to the other one." He went on to give some examples. The most important thing I took from his brief aside before getting onto the day’s regularly scheduled lecture was that no president in history has ever been able to wreck the country irreparably in four or even eight years.

Not Richard Nixon. Not Warren G. Harding. Not Lyndon B. Johnson. Despite my strong feelings on that day in 1992, not William Jefferson Clinton. And regardless of your feelings on the two men, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama will be the first.

And I believe that what went wrong with the Republican Revolution, which started with the stunning 1994 comeback in both houses of Congress, is largely the neoconservative movement and George W. Bush.

What’s sad is that the end all started with so much potential. I vividly remember Bill Clinton, interviewed on the evening news on either ABC, NBC or CBS around 2002 or 2003 talking about Bush. He said he thought Bush would be very successful early on, because of two words that are largely forgotten today: compassionate conservatism. I’m paraphrasing, but basically Clinton said that if Bush could deliver Democratic-like social programs while delivering lower taxes, it would be almost impossible for the Democratic party to compete with that.

Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that. Rather than being remembered as the president who popularized compassionate conservatism, we’ll remember the image of Bush flying over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, looking out of touch and perhaps a bit over his head. Or we’ll remember the bothced recovery effort, which was long on excuses but painfully short on results.

The other Bush promise that never turned into anything was his bipartisanship. As governor of Texas, he had the reputation for reaching out to Democrats and working with them. Unfortunately, as president, we saw a man with little tolerance for anyone who disagreed with him, even if they were members of his own party.

In all fairness, it’s difficult to know how much of what we saw was Bush, and how much of it really was Dick Cheney. And that’s another failing of the Bush presidency: He failed to stand up to Cheney when necessary and put him in his place. The ticket read Bush-Cheney, but
often it seemed the reality was Cheney-Bush.

I don’t think I need to even bring up the wars.

Ultimately, all that came back to bite John McCain. The John McCain who stood up to Bush in 2000 was largely absent in 2008. It’s entirely possible that voters would have punished McCain for the sins of Bush no matter what, but ultimately, McCain didn’t do enough to distance himself from his predecessor. Certainly he risked alienating the 28% of the population who approved of Bush in doing so, but he fell into the same trap the Democrats fell into repeatedly in the 1990s when trying to appease the far left fringes of its party. As long as McCain managed to stay to the right of the Democrats, the minority of the population who favored Bush wasn’t going to abandon him and vote for Obama. McCain needed to concentrate on getting 23% from the center of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, while McCain was failing to distance himself enough from Bush (and was showing he was perfectly capable of being out of touch), Obama was showing up on the Sunday morning political shows, demonstrating that he read things, including newspapers, including the op-ed pages, including the parts written by people he didn’t always agree with. After 8 years of an administration whose idea of keeping informed was listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News, he probably seemed refreshing.

So what’s next?

The comeback doesn’t have to take as long this time. Remember, the only thing less popular than Bush right now is the Democrat-controlled Congress. They get a pass right now because they’re mostly unpopular for not standing up to Bush. But if the new, bigger Democratic majority fails to get desired results, there’s no reason to believe the electorate will be so sympathetic in two years.

So the Republican party needs to be ready. It has until the 2010 primaries to find its soul, to figure out what it stands for.

For their sake and everyone else’s, I hope it involves smaller and more efficient government and taking the Constitution in its entirety seriously.

And in the meantime, we have a man in the White House who embodies the American Dream and who personifies the result of decades of struggle. Whatever you think of his politics, he will inspire a generation or more, and a lot of good can come from that.

What to the rich do with their money?

Dave Farquhar Politics , , ,

Charlie brought up the question of what the rich do with their money in response to the theory of trickle-down economics. This seems timely, as one of my coworkers and I talked trickle-down just yesterday.The theory is often maligned, and usually by people who don’t understand it very well. But frankly its proponents don’t always understand it either.

The classic justification is that if you tax the rich less, they’ll use that savings to buy things like boats and luxury cars, creating jobs for people who build and sell things like boats and luxury cars, and for the suppliers of those companies. And the argument is that this economic activity spreads the wealth better than the government taxing and redistributing wealth, due to government overhead.

At least that’s the simple, back-of-a-napkin explanation you’re likely to hear from a conservative activist when you ask the question. It’s the one I’ve always heard.

The theory is more complicated than that. For most of the 20th century, the fabulously rich were taxed at extremely high rates–70 or even 90 percent. The economist Arthur Laffer argued that if one taxed the rich at a lower rate, then tax revenue would actually increase–the reason being that someone who had the ability to make $10 million probably also had the ability to make more than that, but would probably be more willing to try to make more if the government weren’t taking 90% of the spoils.

Ronald Reagan lowered that upper tax rate to 50%. And sure enough, revenue went up, because 50% of $20 million is more than 90% of $10 million. So both the entrepreneur and the government won.

But contrary to what the modern Republican party seems to think, Laffer didn’t argue that the less you taxed, the more revenue would increase. Tax revenue is a more like a bell curve–tax at 0%, and revenue will be $0. Likewise, take 100%, and revenue will be $0, because nobody will work (or they’ll hide it if they do). The question is what percentage puts tax revenue at the top of the bell curve. I believe that history says it’s somewhere around 38%. Ironically, it was a Democrat who demonstrated that rate. (Hint: it wasn’t Jimmy Carter.)

And when Democrats malign trickle-down economics, they ignore one important fact: When Reagan cut taxes, revenue did rise–a lot. And when Bush I cut them further, it rose even more. The problem was that spending in Washington outpaced revenue growth during the 1980s and most of the 1990s. In the waning years of Clinton’s presidency, revenue finally caught up with spending, and for two years in a row there was actually a small surplus.

And in all fairness to Bush II, that’s been the biggest problem with his economic policy the past 8 years. Revenue went down slightly when he cut the highest tax bracket. But the bigger problem is that Washington spending increased beyond Reagan levels. Had spending stayed in check, we might still be talking about small deficits and occasional surpluses. Instead, he kept taxes low while signing budgets that made Clinton look like a fiscal conservative.

But that’s enough about trickle-down economics. Let’s talk about the rich.

A little over three years ago, I was walking out to my car after work when a couple of well-dressed men approached me and asked for a jump start. I pulled my Honda up to their rental luxury car, we hooked up the cables, got the car started, and they went on their way.

I now believe one of the men that day was the man who soon became the CEO of that company. I won’t name him or the company. Perhaps he was interviewing for the job that day. Not long afterward, he got the job, and as a result of one of his earliest decisions, I lost mine.

So I did a favor for a guy who made $4.81 million last year, and the thanks I got was unemployment.

The soak-the-rich attitude comes from stories like that. When we think of the rich, we think of CEOs who take over large, failing companies, get rid of lots of people, bring in their people, and in the end the companies don’t really get much better, but in the meantime they pocket a few million dollars every year. And when they lose their jobs, they get a golden parachute of a few million more.

But the majority of the rich aren’t like that. They’re more like the owner of the next company I worked for. It was a small consulting company, but it was smaller when he bought it. He bought it during a dark time in its history, brought in some good people, and together they worked hard to make the company profitable again.

In 2006, not long after I met him, he sold the company to a much larger competitor and turned a nice profit for himself. They only retained him for a short time, but he’s not hurting for money. Shrewdly, he didn’t sell them the building, so the company is still paying him rent every month.

Nobody knows what his future plans are, but some people who know him better than I do believe he’ll start another company at some point.

Read books like The Millionaire Next Door, and you’ll find the majority of millionaires are unassuming people who park their Ford Crown Victorias in front of ranch-style houses every night. They’re often self-employed, and usually made their first million by saving a lot and investing in themselves.

I have little respect for the first CEO I talked about, because he has his job mostly because he looks and acts the part. He dresses well, looks like a movie star, and when he talks, he can convince you he cares. But let’s talk qualifications. During his first year on the job, his company’s shares were worth about $1.20 apiece. Now they’re worth 42 cents per share and the company is $1 billion deeper in debt. That’s not all his fault, but it’s hard to argue that he’s done much to turn the company around, and it’s even harder to argue that those results are worth $4.81 million a year. I would think they could outsource his job to India and get comparable results for $100,000 a year and bank the savings.

At least they’d save more than they saved by outsourcing people like me.

I have a lot of respect for my other former employer, because he took a bad situation and turned it around, and he got the job because he bought a company with his own money. He invested his time, energy, and money in it, and besides making himself wealthier, he also created jobs–about 200 of them at his company’s peak–including one for a 31-year-old newlywed who was down on his luck and had worked for two other employers that same year.

The problem with trying to use tax policy to soak people like the first guy I mentioned is that it’s very difficult to do without also hurting the second one I mentioned. And if tax policy hurts him, he might as well just stay retired and play golf or whatever he enjoys doing, rather than starting a new company and making some new jobs for people.

And frankly I’m not sure what we gain when we make people like the first guy pay. I guess we feel better for a while. But the main thing we do is motivate him to hire the very best accountants and lawyers to find and exploit every loophole they can. So he still keeps most of his money, the government gets less than it projected, and the masses are blissfully ignorant, thinking they got some fat cat to finally give up his fair share, whatever that means, but they never see any tangible benefit.

Outlandish CEO pay and incestuous boards of directors loaded with conflicts of interest that perpetuate these outlandish compensation packages really are a separate issue, and the tax code isn’t the appropriate place to try to fix it.

But back to that tax code, and the second guy–the one worth worrying about. For what it’s worth, neither of the two major presidential candidates is likely to do anything that would singlehandedly persuade the second guy to stay retired. A return to Reagan’s or Carter’s income tax levels might, but neither candidate is proposing something like that. The difference between the two is much narrower than either of them want the rest of us to think, and their political rhetoric reflects that.

R.I.P.? The American Dream

Dave Farquhar Society , , , , , ,

Nearly 20 years ago, as I sat in a high school English class, the teacher told us all about the American Dream. And then she said there was one generation that wasn’t going to experience that dream, and she pointed at us.

As grim as things look right now, I can look around myself and see people proving Mrs. Susan Collins wrong, and that makes me happy.I guess she read somewhere that the U.S. economy had basically peaked. I vaguely remember reading something like that sometime in the late 1980s. It would have been just like my Dad to find an article like that in a magazine, rip it out, tell me to read it, and tell me not to let it happen to me.

The current prevailing theory is that as the rest of the world develops, our economy will grow as well because they’ll be better able to afford to buy our stuff. Hopefully by the time that happens, we’ll still know how to make something here.

The real threat to the American Dream right now is the sense of entitlement. When I look at the American Dream, I look at how my Dad lived when he was my age, and I have him beat hands-down. I have a house in the suburbs, and I own it outright. When Dad was 33, he lived in a slum. Well, not quite a slum. It was the former Toledo Motor Lodge, converted (badly) into apartments. The way Mom tells it, it was even worse than it sounds.

The problem is that we’ve been brainwashed not to compare our lives with where our parents were at our age. We’re supposed to have a better life than them right now. And if you’re under the age of 40 and your parents are white collar workers, that’s not a realistic expectation at all.

If my Dad were alive today, he would probably make 2-3 times what I make. Osteopathic radiologists with 30 years of experience make more money than systems administrators with 10 years of experience. What if I’d followed his footsteps and become an osteopathic radiologist like he was? He’d still make more than me, because radiologists with 30 years of experience make more money than radiologists with five years of experience. Who wouldn’t rather have the guy with 30 years’ experience reading their x-rays?

But that’s something my family has been dealing with for generations. Dr. Edward Andrew Farquhar started practicing medicine before the Civil War, and when you trace him to me, I’m one of only two generations who didn’t follow his footsteps. When it comes to the American Dream, it’s hard to compete with your father when your father was the town doctor. It isn’t all just handed to you.

But that’s a blessing in two regards. That means anyone who’s deserving of the title can be the next town doctor. That’s good for everyone, because unspeakable things happen when I have to look at something that’s bleeding a lot. If I were the town doctor, lots of people would probably bleed to death.

And any time someone says the American Dream is dead, I look at my neighborhood. It’s overrun with Bosnians. More than 50,000 Bosnian refugees ended up in St. Louis in the early 1990s.

I wish every city in the United States had 50,000 Bosnians move in, because they’re the best thing that’s happened to St. Louis in a very long time. They found jobs, worked hard, saved money, and bought run-down houses in declining neighborhoods. I can remember (barely) some of those neighborhoods, and they’re a better place now because of it. The neighborhoods not only look better now, but they’re safer.

Some of the children of those refugees are grown now, with jobs and families of their own, and increasingly they’re moving into the suburbs. In other cases, first-generation Bosnian immigrants are upgrading to houses in the suburbs.

It’s clear how they do it. Besides having a regular job, they always have something going on the side. Maybe more than one. They shop at thrift stores and garage sales, and they negotiate hard. They treat every dollar like it’s their last. And they’re always looking for an opportunity, or trying to make one.

They’ve tried to maintain their distinct culture, but what they may or may not realize is that they’re more American than their neighbors down the street who’ve been here for four generations.

I hope they’re still going at it when my son is old enough to pay attention. Because I intend take him out and find some Bosnians in action. And when I do, I’m going to point at them and tell my son to watch everything they do. Because for anyone who’s willing to do what the Bosnians do, the American Dream will always be alive.

How to pay off the national debt in less than 30 years

Dave Farquhar Society , , , ,

A couple of coworkers were talking about taxes, deficits and the national debt this week. One of them looked my direction and said, “I’ll bet Dave can figure out how to pay off the national debt.”

It’s actually not as hard as it sounds.

The biggest problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves that the national debt is impossible to pay. I believed this back in the mid-1990s, when it was around $4 trillion. Today, it’s right around $10 trillion. (Note: That was in 2008. In 2016 it’s about $19 trillion. So double any of the dollar figures you see from here on out.)

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The death of Lyman Bostock

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , , , , ,
The death of Lyman Bostock

In September 1978, the death of Lyman Bostock rattled the California Angels’ heated division title race with the Kansas City Royals. The Angels’ star outfielder was murdered in Gary, Indiana at the age of 27.

ESPN has a tribute.

He’s the best baseball player you’ve never heard of, and quite possibly also the greatest human being you never heard of.

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The international man of mystery

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I’ve been following the Clark Rockefeller story with a lot of interest, perhaps because I’m a parent now, and perhaps because the early news stories kind of made it sound like I should know who he was, although I’d never heard of him before.

Now that the new details are out there, I don’t feel nearly so bad now. Even the people who knew him well didn’t know the half of it.The Telegraph has a good rundown on the current theory about the man. Personally, I think it’ll make a great book and perhaps a movie someday.

The story basically goes like this. Last week, an eccentric and mysterious Boston millionaire disappeared with his daughter during a custody visit. Rumors about their whereabouts spread quickly, including the Caribbean, but the two were eventually found in Baltimore, in an apartment he had recently purchased.

There was no trace of the man prior to 1991. The famous Nelson Rockefeller had a son named Michael Clark Rockefeller, and this Clark Rockefeller seemed to want people to think he either was that person or somehow related to him, but Michael Clark Rockefeller died in 1961 at the age of 23.

As people around the country followed the story, they started noticing this man looked familiar, but they didn’t know him as Clark Rockefeller. But they knew various other people who certainly looked and acted a lot like this Clark Rockefeller, and like him, they would just appear and vanish mysteriously.

Rockefeller appeared in New York in 1991. He never said much about his background, but was well spoken, appeared to be highly intelligent and educated, and could converse with authority on various subject matters. He soon talked his way into high society circles, participated in community groups, and gained influence, particularly in New England, where he settled with his wife, Sandra Boss, an ivy league graduate and wealthy executive. They had a daughter, and he played stay-at-home dad while she earned $1.4 million a year. They divorced in 2007, partly because she believed he might not be what he said he was. Unable to produce any kind of government-issued identification, he didn’t put up much of a fight in the divorce proceedings.

No marriage certificate was ever filed. I wonder if this could cause legal problems for Rockefeller now. After all, if the marriage was never legal, why is there need for a divorce and a settlement? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story seems to begin around 1979 or 1980. A German teenager named Christian Gerhartsreiter or Christian Gerhart Streiter met an American and exchanged addresses. The American said to look him up if he was ever on this side of the Atlantic. Surprisingly, he showed up on their doorstep in Connecticut not long afterward. Unable to accommodate him, they put an ad in the paper. A nearby family who had sponsored a number of exchange students answered.

The young German attended school but seemed put off by a middle class lifestyle. The people who knew Streiter remember him as condescending and arrogant, yet charming. He claimed an elite background, yet there is some indication that his father actually painted houses for a living.

He also could creep people out, so he lived with several different people during the school year, although he remained in touch occasionally with his first host family. After a year of school in the United States, he headed west, first to Minnesota, then to California, where he said he was using the name Christopher Crowe.

In the early 1980s, a man named Christopher Chichester appeared in high society circles in California. Claiming to be British, he charmed his way into belonging. During this time, it appears Chichester applied for a stockbroker’s license and perhaps a driver’s license as well. The fingerprints he provided would prove interesting a few years later.

In February 1985, Chichester’s landlords disappeared. A couple of months later, he disappeared as well. Although Chichester wasn’t a suspect, the authorities wanted to speak with him.

In 1988, a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe surfaced in Connecticut, where he attempted to sell a truck belonging to John Sohus, the landlord who had vanished back in California. Crowe couldn’t produce the paperwork for the truck, so the potential buyer alerted police. But Crowe disappeared again.

In 1994, human remains turned up on the former Sohus property. Authorities believed they had found John Sohus, although his wife has never been found. Authorities still wanted to question Chichester, who they described as a con man who would mingle in social circles and make friends with wealthy, influential people.

But it was 13 years before any trace of Chichester appeared again.

In August 2007, after Baltimore police arrested Clark Rockefeller, people in California noticed that Rockefeller bore a striking resemblance to Christopher Chichester and started calling police. After Rockefeller was fingerprinted, California authorities checked the prints against the prints provided by Chichester more than two decades earlier. They seemed to match.

Rockefeller has said little. Through his attorney, he says that he has little or no memory prior to his marriage in 1995, that as far as he knows his name is Rockefeller, and he most definitely isn’t Christopher Chichester. Other than that, he refuses to stay anything. He sits in a cell, held without bail, because prosecutors don’t believe any amount of money will guarantee he will show up for trial.

And investigators don’t buy the memory story. While they’re giving limited information to the press, new details about Clark Rockefeller’s possible past appear every few hours.

Some questions certainly remain. Early on, some people observed Clark Rockefeller had the distinctive Rockefeller nose, saying it was either genuine or a very good copy. Is the resemblance coincidental? Did someone note once that he looked like a Rockefeller, planting the idea of a new identity in this man’s mind? Or did the former Christopher Chichester decide to take on the Rockefeller identity and have plastic surgery in the late 1980s or early 1990s to make the claim look more believable?

And while it’s possible to track the movements of the various aliases from New England to California and back from 1981 to 1985 to 1988 to 1991, what happened in those gaps?

And perhaps most chillingly, if he wasn’t a suspect in 1985, why did Christopher Chichester flee? If he had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t he answer investigators’ questions?

Some may wonder how a mediocre student could display such knowledge of travel and physics, among other subjects, but it looks like this guy has a fondness for libraries and hasn’t had a job in 28 years. I’m guessing if he spent a significant part of the day in libraries with his nose in books while everyone else is at work, he could become conversant in pretty much anything.

Of course I also wonder how he managed to travel the country and keep up appearances for nearly a decade and a half without a job. Travel and housing cost money, and how did he finance his expensive taste in clothes? Marrying a millionaire certainly helped during the last 12 years, but where did he find the money to woo her?

This story is only going to get better. But I do hope there are no more literal skeletons involved.