Being 17

 

When I was 17, and had graduated high school, I had a girlfriend named Yancey.  She lived in an apartment with her mother, a nurse, who worked the day shift, so Yancey was home alone for the summer. I visited every day for most of the month of June, and I behaved. I am not sure Yancey wanted me to, but I did anyway, even though I didn’t want to either because she had big boobs. And when you’re 17 that is a big deal.

My parents were distraught over these visits, and one day a friend of my brother inadvertently dropped a rubber from his pocket on the floor at our home. Naturally I was blamed in spite of my vigorous protestations of innocence. Dick actually set the record straight and I was absolved of the crime. Nevertheless the wheels were in motion, and I was to be packed off at Mother’s expense to live with my uncle in her childhood home of Newport, Vermont for the rest of that summer of 1960. I was driven one morning to Columbia, South Carolina to catch the train north. We said our goodbyes and I climbed aboard. The interior of the rail car was dark, and I could see only eyes, all staring at me standing in mortified confusion. Shortly, the porter, seeing my problem, pointed me to the ‘whites only’ car and the train left the station.

I was given a down pillow to sleep on that night, but there was a hole in it, and feathers got everywhere. Sleep for this teenager, on his own for the first time, was out of the question.  When we finally pulled into Grand Central Station, I gathered my bag and found a sign that said ‘Information’.  I approached the clerk behind a window, busy reading a newspaper, and asked on which track the next train for Stamford, Connecticut would be found. He pointed to a train schedule on the wall behind him and went back to his newspaper.

In Stamford Uncle Wesley picked me up in his 1954 Ford Woody Wagon and delivered me to his home in time for dinner with my aunt and him, after which I promptly fell asleep. In the morning I was taken to yet another train. This one was a Budd car, a connection of three or four diesel self-propelled cars.  We rhythmically clacked and swayed our way north through rural and green New England until we reached the last stop on the line, Newport, where Robert and his wife Betty were waiting.

That was undoubtedly the best summer of my youth.  I was quickly guided to a warehouse job at Robert’s employer, Canadian Pacific Railway, for $2.17 an hour (union wages) unloading freight cars. No sooner was I there than I was taken under the wing of Armand Bergeron.  Armand was not one for civil discourse, often given to coarse expressions like  ‘shit on a goddam’ and colorful ones such as ‘balls on a heifer’. Pretty good for a native French speaker. I quickly forgot about Yancey and fell in love with a Canadian girl who was going into her junior year at McGill University in Montreal. We went swimming in the lake at night with Robert and Betty, and I took her to summer stock theater more than once.

In early August Robert, Betty and their two boys went on vacation camping in parks around the state. I moved over to my grandmother’s house for that week. My grandfather was not well at the time, and one night I woke to hear a thud in his room.  I looked in to find him under an open window.  He had gotten up to use his bed pan, dressed only in a nightshirt, and in his weakened state he had fallen. I called to my grandmother, and together we lifted him into bed. At 5:00 A.M. the doctor came and told us he needed to be in the hospital, a place he had never been in his life. I went to Robert’s home to get his bathrobe, but before I left my grandmother looked in on him, and he called to her: “Alma, I’m okay”.

Robert’s home was less than a mile, but I walked quickly and was back within 20 minutes. She was clearly upset, wringing her hands, and asked me to check on him. Upstairs, with trepidation, I went in and spoke to him; there was no answer. I lifted his arm, it was rigid, and his skin was cold. I had never seen a dead person before, and now I was staring at my own grandfather. He was 78.

In his retirement, during summer, John Wesley Wyman liked to putter in his ‘victory garden’, sit on his screened porch, smoke his Lucky Strikes, and listen to baseball. That day, Thursday, August 4, 1960, his bottom-of-the-standings Boston Red Sox won a double-header, but he missed it.

Yancey quickly recovered from the loss of my attention and eventually married Jack Jackson, from Jackson, .... Yes, really.  

Why I like E.B. White

He was an essayist in the earliest days of The New Yorker, but probably best known for his children’s books, notably Charlotte’s Web. He also published extensively in Harper’s and The Atlantic.  Andy, as he was known to his friends had no love for his first name, Elwin, which is why he is formally E. B. His nick name, bestowed upon him by his fraternity brothers at Cornell, channeled the president of Cornell at the time, Andrew White. You probably came across, or will, in college, the little volume of English instruction, The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White.  Strunk is the professor, White is E.B.

I am fond of telling people E.B. was my neighbor.  That’s really a stretch. He did own an apartment in Turtle Bay across 2^nd Avenue at 48^th Street from mine, but he had long since sold it, and passed shortly after I got there in 1984. One of his books, The Second Tree from the Corner, while academics have parsed deeper meaning from the title, is a reference to a tree in the courtyard of his apartment building. A leaf falls; a quiet, exact and natural event.

I think the thing that draws me into his world most is his farm on the coast of Maine. Here, with his wife Katherine and their son Joel, he found inspiration for many of his letters and essays. But it is as much the cast of characters around them; his dogs, farm animals, the mailman known to all by his first name, the little library, the foibles of a New Yorker adapting to rural farm life, and the empty boathouse where he escaped to write. No kids, no phones, no interruptions, no heat.

His body of work is comfortable, easy to read, and humorous, at times laugh out loud funny, like “Death of a Pig” for one. If you have read Faulkner or Joyce, both of whom can seem Sisyphean in difficulty, White is like coasting downhill. He uses plain English, well placed, and would never use a word like Sisyphean.  That is his gift; plain English, with each word perfectly placed, each sentence a puzzle he has solved.  Of course, like any author with a large body of work, some are are going to fall flat, and some will feel dated. Katherine, herself an editor of children’s books, would often get on him for neglecting deadlines in order to answer letters from readers, a vice in her eyes, contentment in his.

While living through WWII on his salt farm at Allen Cove (he had no interest in reporting from Europe), he fashioned himself a ‘foreign correspondent’ – reporting to New York readers from the coast of Maine. Even while suffering guilt at not being more involved with the war effort, he was deluged with grateful mail from troops overseas, anxious to read about life at home. He did play a role early on as part of a team that came up with Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, which were introduced in his State of the Union address in 1941, preparing America for the inevitability of entering the war.

As I read over some of his work once more, I realize how presumptuous of me it is to write an essay about this master essayist, so if you will follow this link I will let his words speak for themselves.

https://gwarlingo.com/2012/writer-e-b-white/ (Read the PDF version.) 

Corporate Greed - A Primer

         In a New York second, after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York courtroom, CNN and MSNBC producers were hard at work on new content speculating on his appeal, and would it be upheld, blah, blah, blah. The legions of TV lawyers arrayed across a set are as clueless as they were about predicting the trial itself. The true value of all this is, of course, useless, but that isn’t the point, viewership is, and satisfying corporate advertisers.  It matters not a whit how disgusted you and I are, or how intellectually insulted we might be about wall-to-wall cable coverage of Trump, it draws viewers, and advertisers must reach an audience. Forget morality, social welfare, news we need to know, it is all about earning a buck and satisfying the expectations of ownership. Such is the world of a market economy, and corporate greed in the sphere of public companies.. 

The term ‘free market’ is easily tossed around, but that is a misnomer because economies exist within a regulatory framework. And that framework permits corporate greed in spades. Of necessity. Meanwhile well-meaning individuals, and like-minded groups push back, usually to little avail.  Here’s why: There are two fundamental categories of business, private and public. Private business organizations are owned by one or more individuals and those principals make the decisions. If they don’t want the moon, they don’t have to try.

Successful ones, which wish to grow and prosper, get new financial capital for that growth organically (earned income), by borrowing from a lender, or by bringing in new partners. Good companies with great ideas often outgrow those sources to continue growth and make the decision to go ‘public’. After meeting stringent requirements and accounting methods, these businesses hire investment bankers to take them public. That is essentially raising new capital by issuing shares of ownership to new investors, and importantly creating a board of directors if one does not exist. This major change in strategy results in shifting the focus on future performance to the demands of these many new owners, which must be met - or else.

         Do you have an IRA, 401k, 403B or other retirement account, or a mutual fund, or own shares (or stock) in the company you work for?  If so, you damn well want the value of those shares to grow, don’t you? If one company doesn’t meet your demands, you can shift your money to another manager or other investments, thereby punishing the laggard by selling your shares on a stock exchange and maybe pushing the value of the underperforming shares even lower. Enough investors doing that, and the management team can get the axe – even original owners. That is the way public companies work. The bottom line for public companies then is maximizing shareholder value. Investors put there own money at risk, and rightly expect an opportunity at a return.

         Wall Street is the seat of the financial services industry in the U.S. and serves the vital function of providing buyers and sellers investment capital. It is often the punching bag for activists when there is a movement to push back against greed. I can assure you that social good is not an element of business plans. And when it comes to corporate largess for social good, it most often comes from a corporate foundation, not the operating funds of the entity.

Corporations must often exist in a highly competitive, ever changing market economy and need to do all that is legal to make every last dime to satisfy owners – of which you may be one. Otherwise an element of your future such as buying a home, educating your kids, or retiring, could be in jeopardy.

         My take on corporate America is ignore the stupid ads we are bombarded with, consider the new jobs that are created with economic growth we experience in the U.S. - unparalleled anywhere on Earth, the generation of individual wealth - which often funds our schools, colleges, pioneering health care research, and human dignity initiatives.  But, always demand corporations toe the line on their climate impact. With no excuses for the corrupt and narcissistic Trumps of the world, forget about the underbelly – greed.  The corporate glass is half full, not half empty.