Chapter 15: (Cont._4)

With an engineer and tech on board, our company proceeded into 1972 with additional vigor. We picked up some engineering work on the basis our planning work. In professional circles, that was what we termed as using a “loss leader.”

We did the planning work on the cheap, often “on the come,” in order to develop the more profitable and stable engineering work. Americans don’t intrinsically believe in planning in most situations. Usually, except in the case of rural land developers, engineering is considered a requirement.

The firm was sailing along. Then we discovered a glitch, a “fly in the ointment,” a burr resting dangerously under the saddle blanket, or, as they say in the South, a “wast-nest” in the outhouse.

Our engineer couldn’t get along with the clients. He got on well with most folks, but not the ones who signed the checks. Most of us who had worked to develop the work now found ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time refereeing disputes.

The trick, we learned, was to keep him, the engineer, as far away from direct client involvement as possible. Others with better human relation skills filled in as direct contacts. Ron McConnell proved exceptionally good at this. Thus, we were able to keep the ship on course with just a minor trimming of our corporate rigging.

The firm took on another partner, the best land-planner that our state has probably ever known. His name was Jack Castin, a native of Oklahoma, a graduate of Notre Dame where he attended on a football scholarship, and he was a fine and pleasant fellow. He had attended the University of Oklahoma graduate school of urban and regional planning with Tom and Jim. There, he became a legend as a magician with pen and sketch paper. He brought those skills to our firm.

There followed some heady times. I didn’t know it, but my personal life was about to some uncharted seas. I suppose when two people live in the same building, even if for one it is part-time, they are bound to meet, like two ocean vessels on a misty morning.

Someone should have sounded the foghorns.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 15 (Cont._3)

Monday came on a nice early May morning in 1972 and I had a problem. It may have been an opportunity more than a problem. Either way, I faced an obstacle. We needed an engineering tech at the office, and I had fallen heir to the assignment. I looked for several days and then quit.

I had found one. He was just what we needed. There was just this small matter. He was the Boss’s distant cousin. As such, he had been offered a job when the firm opened and had turned it down, fearing the risk of the unknown over a secure job with the state highway department.

Now the company had been around for a couple of years and the risk had diminished. The Boss’s ego hadn’t. It had grown, in fact. That evidenced itself when I told him that morning about my find, and about their relationship.

He didn’t express a great deal of enthusiasm, quite the contrary.

I relied on a tried and true management skill that I had been taught in the Navy’s advanced human relations training.

It’s called Class A Ass-kissing.

“Don’t you see, though,” I said, “how being under your guidance would train him to take risks and address challenges? I know it has me. The family would be thankful. I know I would, too.”

“He gave me one of those ‘don’t try to pull that crap with me’ looks and shrugged. “I don’t care,” he said. “He’ll be working for the engineer and not for me. Do what you want.” We went on to a different matter.

I called Ron McConnell and suggested that he might want to give notice. Building a good team isn’t hard. You just have to find individuals that fit, and who, at least in this case, knew a circle template from a T-square. That phone call was the basis of a friendship that has lasted through “many dangers, toils, and snares.” Funny how things work that way.

That evening, I came home from work to my new apartment, now furnished with cast-off items and a few new things. I even had a TV now. It was a primitive color set, loaned to me by my sister, bought years before after she had gotten a promotion, one of countless ones over the years that would land her at the top of both her profession and a high-rise office building. Have I mentioned that my sister is some sort of genius? "She got it all," Sainted Mother used to say.

My next-door neighbor was standing in her doorway as I approached. She was behind a screen door, but I could tell she was wearing naught but an unbottoned blouse and a pair of lacy panties. She asked if I had gotten moved in okay. Her name was Rita and she was an attractive and wonderful, though slightly eccentric person.

As I was trying to clear my head and decipher her question despite the obvious distraction, her sister Vernell, also a “looker” and nice person, walked up. She lived upstairs, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend from college who taught school in a nearby town and who lived part-time with Vernell.

She took one look at her sister through the screen and said, “Didn’t quite finish dressing, did we?”

Rita looked down. “Oops,” she said, slamming the apartment door.”

Vernell turned to me. “Enjoying your new apartment and the neighbors, are we?”

I blushed. She laughed, winked, opened the door, and went inside Rita’s apartment. She left me there to wonder, not for the first time in my life and not the last, why people in my life invariably marched to the beat of drummers that only they heard. That was true.

It would only get truer.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Five

With the rancor subdued, we went to work on the remaining projects due inside two months. There was still some cleanup waiting. The guys at the blueprint shop still weren’t speaking to us. It was over their being blamed for the big screw-up. Of course they would do our work but the effort would lack any enthusiasm.

Here, I was stuck in a sea of ignorance. My folks in the office weren’t going to teach me the printing business. They were to busy or too obstinate; take your pick. I knew “jack-diddly” about it, and figured one couldn’t learn it from a book.

As my Sainted Mother would say, I “backed my ears,” and called the print shop, when no one was listening, and asked to speak to the printer. He came on and I introduced myself. He responded with such chill that I felt cold air coming through the phone’s receiver. I took a deep breath and said, “Look, can I just come over and talk?”

Sure, why not?

The shop wasn’t far from the office, so I walked over. Once there, a pleasant man—I found out later that he was the owner’s son-in-law—showed me the way to the print shop. I opened the door and a familiar smell overwhelmed me.

I knew the smell from having worked my last year of college drafting for the U of A Editorial Service. We prepared graphics and did printing for research papers and dissertations. The job was a huge step-up from being janitor at the Chi Omega house, but I had missed the sorority girls, some of whom liked to run into the hallway wearing bras and panties when I yelled up, “Man on the floor.”

 But, I digress. Back to the printing business and the smell of the presses.

It was a smell I would come to love. In the room stood a rotund man with swept-back gray hair along with a sour-faced man, balding and wearing dirty spectacles. The heavy-set man was Bob French, the printer. The other was Bob Wilson, the photographer.

Before the dialogue had a chance to deteriorate, I said, “First, may I apologize for any misunderstanding that our two companies have had?”

It caught the two by surprise. In fact, one of the cruelest lies that I’ve seen foisted on young people is from a character on television who tells his underlings, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness,” That’s the crassest piece of bull hockey I’ve ever heard. There is, when you have been wrong, nothing more disarming and effective than a sincere apology. Trust me.

Anyway. After a moment, Bob Wilson said, “So you are in charge of printing at your company now?”

“I’m in charge of trying to get it all done.”

“What’s your experience?”

“Absolutely none. That’s why I wanted to ask a favor of the two of you.”

“What’s that?” Bob asked. His demeanor had softened but still displayed suspicion.

“I want to ask you to help me learn how to do things. I know you have better things to do than teach beginners, but we have lots of work to do and, if we can work together and get it done, I’ll be your friend forever. No more confusion. No more blame. No more bullshit of any kind. I’m asking for your help, and your friendship.”

They gave it. It started that day, particularly with Bob French. He was my pal and mentor from that moment until his untimely death from cancer 30 years later.

On that day, we agreed that I would come over each time a new printing job came up that required close coordination. They would help me to understand the processes involved, and I would give them both due credit and respect. Those are tactical maneuvers that have gotten me over many a hump throughout the years, and I recommend them without reservation.

I never heard him, but it’s told that Bob French was a talented singer and quite popular in small venues after working all day as a printer. He looked a bit, and evidently sounded a lot, like the singer Charlie Rich. I wish I had taken the time to hear him, but regrets are the songs that teach us to be better people, if we only listen.

After I promised to bring the next job in and go over it with them before any step was taken, they showed me out. I started walking back. Knowing that I had steered around a dangerous shoal, I began to hum to myself, mindlessly and with some degree of satisfaction. Then I started singing, so no one else could hear, an odd tune.

Of all things, it was The Marine Corp Hymn.

“Never apologize.” What a crock of shit.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Four (Cont._5)

I guessed right. My promotion at the new job failed to scour in the back room. My two co-workers returned from their briefing and said nothing. There was a silence so stony it could have been used to fashion arrowheads. I ignored them, choosing instead to spend the rest of the day amending my list of projects into a more detailed plan of attack.

That night, I listened to Chet Atkins playing Spanish guitar, finished off the bottle of Ripple I had started the night before, and contemplated strategy and tactics. From my naval experience I knew that critical elements for a successful mission included buoyancy, propulsion, and maneuverability, along with firepower, of course. From a book called Vom Kriege (On War) by Carl von Clausewitz, one that I had found in our ship’s library, I remembered other principles. It was critical, in a campaign, not to let friction slow progress. That implied a need for tactical analysis. I thought and planned.

I slept the sleep of the chosen and arose early. After a calorie-laden “Bear Claw” and coffee at the Lion’s World snack bar, I headed for the office and was deeply involved in scribbling when the rest of the staff arrived.

The drafting crew went to work without looking my way. After an hour or so, I stopped what I was doing and asked where they kept some supply or other. “Don’t you know?” came the reply from the once head of the drafting room. I sensed, rather than heard, a suppressed giggle from the woman across the room.

I ignored it and searched for myself. One must avoid war at all costs, and they should be initiated only for irrefutable justification. Just ask the families of those tens of thousands who were still coming home then in coffins or wheelchairs. One shot, supposedly fired at a small naval vessel, isn’t worth 58,220 American and over three and a half million Vietnamese lives.

No, I waited for a more positive opportunity, one that could be a learning experience for us all. It wasn’t long in coming.

Jim Vines stuck his head in the drafting room and asked me to bring a print of the notes we had taken at the city of Dierks a couple of weeks before. I rose and walked to the map file. Stopping, I chose the calmest voice I could muster and asked the head drafter where the maps of that city were kept.

He completed the line he was drawing, set his pen aside carefully, turned to me, and said, “You’re the head man who’s in charge now. Ain’t you supposed to know things like that?” He turned and reached for his pen.

Here was the test. As a petty officer in the proudest branch of military service, I had profited from months on end of high-level management training, some of the best, I imagine, in the world. I mentally ran through scenario after scenario of dealing with insubordination, applied practical knowledge to empirical analysis, formed a mental “decision-tree,” and walked closer to him, calling him by name.

“What say we review that last exchange?” I said.

He laid his pen aside and looked at me as if I had just interrupted a complicated surgery. “What?”

“Let’s ask ourselves,” I said, “whether I politely asked you a question, the answer to which was simple and would help us move progress along?” I stopped, guessing correctly that information needed to be provided in small bites. When he turned to look at me, I said, “Or did I by some chance ask you for a cheap ration of shit?”

That confused him. I heard the woman swivel in her seat. I knew she was licking her lips in anticipation.

“Now,” I said, “if that sort of wise-assed response is going to be typical, I can just leave. I'll tell Tom and Jim I quit, and let you and your pal over there start back running things. That was working real well, wasn’t it?”

The air fairly roared with furious silence. He looked at me and I could feel the wheels spinning.

“Make up your mind,” I said. “I don’t have all day to put up with someone’s bullshit attitude and eighth-grade humor.”

Daggers flew from his eyes. I had seen the look hundreds of times from big, strong, men contemplating orders they didn’t particularly like, knowing how easily they could smash the giver of the orders.

He relaxed, forced a half-grin, and said, “Dierks is in the third file from the bottom.”

“Thanks,” I said. I turned to the woman, “Are we okay?”

She nodded and they both returned to their work. We never had any more problems after that. In fact, I found them to be nice people as time passed. It’s funny how well things work out within the structure of sophisticated management techniques.

Contemplating applied
management training