The Man with No One to Talk to: and Other Rare Opportunities

The Man with No One to Talk to

and Other Rare Opportunities

Alan Eaton

Copyright © 2024 Alan Eaton

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89315-090-2 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89315-107-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Growing Up

Born in the USA

My Parents

Life at Home

Holidays

Repairing Stuff

Photography

The Neighbors

Grandmother Katherine's Gun

Family Vacations and Nearby Attractions

Trips to the Beach

World's Fairs

The Garage

Cats

School

High School

The Lives of Real People

The Old House

Motorcycles

On My Own

The University of Michigan

Summer Jobs in Maryland

The Man with No One to Talk To

A New Family

Ford Scientific Research Labs

Life in Michigan

Going West

The Decision to Go to California

Stanford University

ECM

SAE Conferences in Detroit

Snap-on Scan-Grafix

Life in California

Estate Sales

The Auction House

The Speaker's Circuit and Politicians

Travels

Reno, Nevada

Airports

Trips to Hawaii (1985 and 1987)

International Trips

Italy (1998)

The UK (2001)

Almost Egypt (2001)

New Zealand (2002)

Australia (2004)

China (2005)

Switzerland and Austria (2006)

Canada (2007)

USA National Parks (2014)

Ohio and Michigan Genealogy Trip (2015)

France (2018 and 2019)

Almost St. Petersburg (2020)

Retirement

About the Author

Preface

While doing genealogical research on our families for the last several years, we have wished that our ancestors had written the stories of their lives. We may know when they arrived in North America from a ship manifest, but not the real reasons why they left. Even if they were just looking for economic opportunity, it would be nice to know what contributed to their decision to come here. And when describing their life, they would have provided a lot of information about what was going on around them—context about world events, governments, powerful individuals, and relatives. Their attitudes, outlooks, associations, and communities. The kind of context that is missing from an entry on a government form.

I would like to know why my ancestors immigrated to New Amsterdam (now New York) from the Netherlands in 1651. Was this part of a group to set up international commerce? Were they driven out of the Netherlands for some reason? And how did things go when they arrived? My wife of forty-six years, Adele (I have permission to call her my wife), had relatives who arrived in the twentieth century when much more information was recorded about their origins and destinations. But we still do not know very much about their lives. An immigrant in the twentieth century had to provide a destination contact (person) upon entry. Why did Adele's maternal grandfather choose a particular relative to put on the form? Why did Adele's other grandfather choose to work at a remote lumber camp in Canada? We will never know because they did not write down their stories.

My parents were not interested in passing along information about their ancestors, even when there were inherited family items around the house. The fire axe that I was using along with neighborhood kids turned out to be an axe bought by my grandfather in Toledo in 1914. In 1914, a fireman had to buy their own axe. He would later become a district fire chief. Both sides of my family had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, but we would have to learn about them on our own.

My life was in many ways the same as any American born in the 1950s and who grew up living in houses in the suburbs. We had more space than average, but not more money. It was not at all certain how my life would turn out. A series of unusual opportunities would guide my path through life. This document is a description of how an average life like mine can end up above average if the right opportunities come along. But opportunities do not matter if you are afraid of change. Or if you are afraid of your limitations. To take advantage of opportunities, you must be self-reliant. Perhaps your parents will split up when you are sixteen, your father will get married again, and your mother will join the Peace Corps and leave the country for five years. Never assume that things will remain as they are.

Introduction

It didn't feel like a privileged life. But I had the privilege of living in areas with very low crime. I realize now that feeling safe is perhaps the most important aspect of enabling achievement by an individual. More about that later.

My memories are mostly from after age nine. That was 1962. In the last sixty years since I was nine, there have been many changes in the way people relate to each other and the way organizations relate to each other and changes in how people relate to organizations. But perhaps the most important change of all is the increase in world population. Former president Bill Clinton has said that most problems in the world start with a loss of self-respect, either for an individual or a group. Large-scale migration is becoming commonplace now and is destroying the self-respect of many groups—including the people migrating of course.

In 1962, the United States was younger. The average age was about twenty-nine. Now the average age is closer to thirty-nine. In my school years, the great-grandparents were long gone. Now great-grandparents sometimes show up for school graduations. And in 1962, the population of the United States was 192 million—329 million now. And there will be a net gain in the world population of about 200,000 in the next twenty-four hours. If you don't like the way things are now, just wait awhile because a tsunami of human beings is about to wash away most of world history.

Some say we are now entering a truly multipolar world. Hopefully, this will turn out better than the multipolar world which existed before WWI. Even with all the problems of the last few decades, Pax Americana worked. There was no WWIII. At least not yet. There was a cold war, which was the Soviet Union's war; the war began and ended when the Soviets began and ended it. Since WWII, there has been economic development everywhere, and there are people with new capabilities all over the world.

In 1962, segregation still existed in the United States. There was a recorded-message phone line by the National Socialist White People's Party, which we sometimes called for entertainment. No one I knew took that stuff seriously. There was also a recorded-message phone line by the Catholic Church, describing which movies observant Catholics should avoid seeing. Of course, we used this message line for the opposite reason.

I have met three racists in my age group on my journey. Two in Maryland, one White and one Black, and one White racist in Michigan. I define a racist as someone who changes their behavior because they do not like people of a particular color, not someone who makes racist jokes or condescending comments. But in the places where we lived, the Civil War was long forgotten. The South shall rise again was a joke, not a rallying cry. The schools were integrated. The Black kids who attended my elementary school were calm, friendly, respectful of authority, and confident. Probably because their families owned large amounts of farmland. In high school, I got to know some Black students who did not hate me for being White, and I did not hate them for being Black. One of these students would go on to the US Naval Academy.

Another major change since 1962 is women entering the workforce in large numbers. In the 1950s to 1960s, the main jobs available for women were stay-at-home mom, teacher, or nurse. Of course, these are three of the most important jobs in any society anywhere. All three relate to raising and guiding the next generation. But understandably, women have long strived to achieve as part of the general workforce. Adele rode one of these waves of change and had a nearly thirty-year career in engineering.

But what about the kids? There are many kinds of smart. But whatever kind of smart you are discussing, we can estimate that about half of all the smart people in the world are women, since about half of the people are women. This means that when our society forced those standard jobs on women, one half of all the smart people in the country were involved in raising children. My mother had a BS in chemistry and never went to work when I was young.

Women have created successful new roles in the general workforce. Men, get out of the way! That was easy. But we are still trying to figure out how the children fit into the picture. A woman raising kids in the 1950s to 1960s depended on a network of other women. Each woman in the group had some individual talent and helped the others either by action or example, and together, the group could solve whatever problems came along. Now that BS chemistry would be working for a chemical company. Not only would she be less available for her kids, but she would also be less available to all the other mothers to help them cope. Don't panic; this is not an argument against women's rights. It is an argument to start thinking clearly about the future of children. Let's not look down on women who only want to raise kids. Or men, for that matter. Some disinterested part-time parents today are raising school shooters. Mother could have worked outside the home. I'm glad that mother chose to be a stay-at-home mom.

Change in the natural world happens slowly. Trees take decades to grow to a great height. Climate change is taking decades. But changes in human affairs can happen very quickly. In just ten years, the United States became in 1970 a country radically different from 1960. One journalist described the 1960s as a time when you were afraid to go to sleep because you might miss something important. What happened each day was always partly planned and partly unexpected—on the edge of history each day. It is hard to describe how important the space program was to the mood of the country. And there was the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, political assassinations, the Environmental Protection Agency, and in 1971, the constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen, just in time for me to vote in 1972. And the legal drinking age became eighteen in most states, just as I was going to college. And change went on and on and is not slowing down in the twenty-first century, but the drinking age is back to twenty-one.

One problem the country faces now is the lack of cooperation in Congress. They call it polarization, and this is preventing moving forward on important issues. There is much discussion about how things used to be different. If you are interested in the causes of this change from cooperation to confrontation, I recommend the book In and Out of Vogue (1995) by Grace Mirabella. This is her story about her role in the development of the fashion industry. She had various jobs in the fashion industry, including being the editor of Vogue magazine and then starting her own publication called Mirabella. I hear you laughing. How could a book about fashion teach us about today's congress? Well, it turns out that in the early post-war years, the major fashion houses, while fiercely competing to produce the most desirable designs, would cooperate with each other to solve problems with production, and they all knew each other socially. The designers we all know by name would be seen walking down the street in New York or Paris. No bodyguards. What changed was that the paparazzi harassed them endlessly and made them famous, leading to isolation and losing contact with others in the industry. These personalities in the fashion industry could not even go out to dinner without being harassed. Eventually, this harassment and isolation would encourage a negative view of other people. Sound familiar?

In the early 1960s, the change in your pocket was 90 percent silver. The silver in a ten-cent dime from 1962 has a value of $1.34 now. These silver coins made it difficult for the government to inflate (debase) the money since the coins themselves had value independently of the printing on them. So the government removed the silver from the coins and started spending much more than was collected in taxes. If this extra money is spent on long-term productive assets, the results will be positive. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

This was a time before portable phones and the internet. The bad news was that if your car broke down, you would have to walk to find help somehow, which might take a while. You could not just take something out of your pocket and call for road service. The good news was that you were not constantly harassed by social media and endless advertisements, and your parents could not track you, and rich people were mostly admired. Not loved, just admired, because of their accomplishments.

What was easy in 1962 is now hard in 2022. Like finding a house. In 1962, the house you found might be farther away from your job than you liked, but the house would be affordable. This was a kind of safety net for people. What was hard in 1962 is now easy in 2022. We had an unlabeled picture of my father wearing a graduation gown in front of a university building. Looking at images on Google, we figured out which university it was in a minute. The explosion of knowledge since 1962 is astounding and is a lot more than just the use of DNA. Look at some of the streaming Wondrium courses to catch up on advancements in the sciences and everything else!

I can say that both of my parents were positive role models. Example is the most effective teacher. There was not a lot of hate in our family. Prejudice was never on the menu. I'm glad that they did not make condescending comments about Polish or Italian people, for example. I would marry an Italian and cofound a successful business with a person of Polish descent. In fact, they never gave me much detailed instruction at all. That was a blessing since I have observed that if you give a kid only one choice, they will probably choose none of the above.

I was always encouraged to be self-reliant, and interactions with my parents were always about me, never about them. And they never called me stupid, even when I was. They assumed that I would be able to figure by myself that I had done something stupid. There was no kids world separate from the adult world. I never had a lot of toys, or a bicycle with training wheels. My playroom was the real world. My greatest fear was not being useful since all the adults around me were useful. With some unusual opportunities, I would grow up to become a useful, mostly fearless, self-reliant overachiever.

Part 1

Growing Up

Born in the USA

There is something special about being born in the nation's capital. Being born in Washington, DC, was my first opportunity. It was 1953, and the family lived in suburban Maryland, just across the border. School field trips were to Smithsonian museums and the National Art Gallery. We got to see the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery of Art in 1963, along with five hundred thousand other people. The painting was behind bulletproof glass, with an armed guard on each side, but you were allowed to view it from just a few feet away. And I grew up reading the Washington Post of the 1960s in the 1960s. I learned that you should not rely on the summaries of a piece of legislation in the media; you should read the actual text of the legislation. The legislation may do much more than is being reported.

Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. A religion, for example. But in my case, it was the idea of the United States. I felt a connection to the United States and to the idea of personal freedom and individual rights. A right to privacy in the constitution? I always thought the entire constitution declared a right to privacy. The right to privacy is the right to be left alone. Throughout history, people have fought tyranny so they can plan their own futures without asking a monarch or government for permission first. World history, up to the present day, is mostly a story of one gang or another pushing people around. Our constitution specifies the limited ways that the government can annoy the people. Leave the religions alone. Leave the press alone. Unless you have a good reason, leave the people alone. Constitutional lawyers have different interpretations, and freedom is hard.

The government can make you an American citizen, but whether you become an American or not is entirely up to you. It is not easy to be an American. To be an American, you must understand that your freedom depends on allowing others to be free without being harassed. Other people will do things you hate, and you must remain silent. Freedom means not knowing what other people are doing. To be free, you must let others be free, and free to make mistakes. Freedom is a difficult