Chapter 10. Save the World, or Save Myself?

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

 

I apologize to my readers, for I have gotten ahead of myself in this story.  Picking up where I was at the beginning of Chapter 9, I had twelve part-time people working for me, and I was taking $800 per month out of the business to live on.  I had this dinky little office in the basement of a building near the apartment where Barbara, I, and our first daughter Meghan lived.  The office was about the size of a closet, one room, and there was this deep ditch outside the basement door to the building, with a wooden plank thrown across it as an entrance.  I paid $90 per month for this.  There was a large standpipe from the floors above that went right past my desk, and whenever anyone upstairs flushed a toilet, you could hear it whistling right past my desk on the way down into the sewer.  I had an old metal battleship desk I had bought from a customer for $25.  I was drowning in problems and had no idea where to turn to for help.  And I couldn’t think of whatever else I could do if this failed.  It was not uncommon at all for me to work 24 or even 36 hours straight before collapsing in bed.  I did not consider myself a businessman at all; I felt totally incompetent and foolish.  What kept me going was desperation and fear of failure.  Barbara and my combined, adjusted gross income that first year was $5600.  We were below Appalachian poverty level.  I’m sure we qualified for all kinds of government Welfare, but we didn’t even know it existed and it never occurred to us to ask.  It never occurred to us that we were anyone’s responsibility but ourselves.

I went to the town library and looked up trade journals and sent in a card to one of them.  I started getting junk mail, and eventually I saw an advertisement for a trade association convention to be held in Orlando, Florida.  I figured out what it was going to cost for Barbara and I to go down there, and it was about $600.  I don’t remember where we got the money from, but we went.  I was shocked.  I expected to meet a whole bunch of miserable sods like myself trying to stay alive, and there were some.  But I also met many very successful operators, some of them multi-national,  with literally tens of thousands of employees each. 

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Chapter 9. Starting Over: From Rags to Regulators.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the last few weeks at Watchtower, I began preparations for entering the outside working world.  Since I loved to write, I sought a job as a writer.  It took no time at all to discover that writers with  phD’s were falling out of trees.  My first obstacle was how to explain how I had spent the last nine years of my life.  Life in a monastery?  A waiter, bookbinder, letter writer for Jehovah’s Witnesses??  How to explain why I left?  To have children?  On the outside, people didn’t have to quit their jobs and relocate in order to start a family.  What was I qualified to do?  How much did I have to earn to survive, to support a wife and possible child?  I had no idea about any of the above.  I had never bought a car, established credit, learned a trade, or gone to college.  I was twenty-seven years old.  During the few disastrous  job interviews before we left Brooklyn, I did learn the short answer to why I left my last “position”:  “Career redirection.”   My first lesson in spin control.  Substance and unnecessary detail were not nearly as important as a few words that created a brief image.  I also learned a quick lesson right out of law school:  Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.  Also,  never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Suffused with early rejection and a sense of impending disaster, Barbara and I decided to move to Youngstown, Ohio where she grew up.  Her parents encouraged us to stay with them until we got on our feet.  Our timing was impeccable.  Unknown to us, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a steel company that was a pillar of the economic community was about to announce its closing, the first in a string of dominoes due to fall in quick succession and ultimately to devastate the local economy.  Unbeknownst to us, the biggest business in the Youngstown area appeared to be organized crime, and the economy was so bad even they were leaving town.  With tens of thousands thrown out of work, we came to Youngstown like two immigrants just off the boat and looking for work.  And like first-generation immigrants, because of being sequestered for over nine years in near-monastic existence, we couldn’t speak the language of the new world in which we found ourselves.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend their thought processes.  It was massive culture shock, and we were too ignorant and innocent to even feel sorry for ourselves.

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Chapter 8. It All Falls Apart

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

My star continued to rise, and soon I was requested to rewrite some of the lectures composed by some of the lesser talents in the Writing Department.  By this time I felt quite free about inserting much of my own philosophy in my writing.  After all it was all going to be reviewed and censored by others anyway.  So I lent my voice to the cacophony of dissent.  I wrote an article published in the Awake! magazine about the etymologies of words, and offered to write an article for the Watchtower   entitled “Are You a Thinking Christian?”  It bothered me that so much of the membership seemed to follow the route of least resistance and looked for a higher authority to tell them what to do when faced with the slightest conflict in their life.  They seemed incapable of abstracting principles from concrete situations and forming independent conclusions.  When I submitted my Abstract for the article, I received a letter in return from the Writing Department strongly admonishing me to build my article around prayer, meeting attendance, and regular door-to-door field service.  Only then did I realize the organization had a vested interest in the membership conforming to policy, and the last thing they needed was for them to become independent minded.  Later still I came to realize that the intended title of my article was in itself something of an oxymoron.  Not entirely however:   there were quite a few of us in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas who were attempting mightily to reconcile faith and intellectual integrity.  I never wrote the article.

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Chapter 7. From Manufacturing to Amanuensis

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During this period of time, there were several other interesting developments.  My boss, Ralph Lindem, who was a very kind man who struggled mightily with his management responsibilities,  was bumped upstairs to Purchasing, and was replaced by John Adams, who was in his early thirties and very bright.  John quickly shuffled the deck of bindery leadership, put some young, bright men who were very loyal to him in charge of various departments, and in no time at all had the bindery humming.  Production improved quickly, and in contrast to his predecessor who had put in such long days, John was often to be found in the Bindery Office reading the New York Times, with his feet propped up on the desk, an impertinence Ralph Lindem would never have dreamed of.  When the Factory Overseer, a soft-spoken Swede named  Max Larsen  would wander by, John showed respect by putting his feet down, but he did so unapologetically.  This took chutzpah because, to me at least,  Max Larsen always conveyed the impression of an iron fist in a velvet glove.  Maybe John just knew how good he was at his job.  One of many business lessons I learned from John Adams was never to confuse activity with results.

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Chapter 6. Early Socialist Yearnings

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the first six months at headquarters we were enrolled in Primary School, later more aptly named Bethel Entrants School.  During this period we were required to read the entire Bible verse by verse, and annotate it, i.e. make notes on the meaning of each text in longhand.  We were also enrolled in the Bethel Theocratic Ministry School, which was exactly like the one I had grown up with, except that at Bethel, we had two counselors, the regular one and the Silent Counselor.  The Silent Counselor met with you after the program was over, and he was the guy you had to impress, for a very important reason.  If you obtained three consecutive good ratings from your Silent Counselor, you were appointed to the Bethel Speakers List.  Once on this list of approved speakers, you would be assigned once a month to visit a congregation within two hundred miles of Bethel, all expenses paid.  You represented headquarters, and you were considered one of their best speakers.  You were held in very high esteem, if not awe, by the locals in the congregation you visited, and it was not uncommon for many of them to show their appreciation by putting cash in your pocket.  So this privilege brought prestige, fun, travel and time away, and money.  The money issue was never discussed but it was always appreciated.  Generally speaking I’m talking about a few hundred dollars total from a visit to one congregation.  Ironically it was my experience that the poorest congregations usually contributed the most.  Later, in the real world, I was to make a similar observation that the wealthiest patrons in a restaurant were often the stingiest tippers.

The best part of being on the Speakers List is that on each visit to a congregation, you gave two one-hour speeches, one on Saturday night and one the following Sunday.  The one on Sunday was standard issue, written by headquarters writers.  The Saturday night speech, called a Service Talk, was a topic and content of your own choosing.  My first such presentation was “Are You Happy?”, and the second one was “Are You A Thinking Christian?”  It turned out that both subjects have been core elements of a lifelong spiritual quest–for rationality, purpose, achievement, and meaning.  With both subjects I found my audiences universally hungry for answers to the same questions:  It was easily apparent I was hitting a mother lode of interest.

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Chapter 5. Sex in the City

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

So at the age of eighteen, I left home to do missionary work in Oil City, PA, where I learned it was possible to be poorer still and hungry.  We learned to buy food at school supply warehouses in No. 10 cans and this would save a lot of money. The only problem was we were broke after buying three cases of food, one each of corn, peas, and beef stew.  We ate corn, peas, and beef stew for weeks for every meal.  To this day it is hard for me to eat beef stew.  Sometimes the only food in the house was jello, and we would eat that until it was gone.  

None of us were doing very well at finding jobs.  Oil City was a very old, depressed town.  I went to the local Holiday Inn to apply for a job as a janitor.  The Inn Manager said he had a janitor but needed a Night Auditor, and asked me if I had any experience.  I said no, but I was a fast learner.  He hired me for $1.65 per hour and I went to work that Saturday night.  It was an awful night.  I had no comprehension of auditing, and I knew that everything in the front desk posting machine had to balance by 8 a.m.  To make matters worse I had to operate the switchboard, one of those old fashioned ones with the cords that plugged in.  The Harlem Globe Trotters were staying in the Inn that night and the switchboard was going crazy.  In no time at all, I had the switchboard all tangled up and a lot of frustrated house guests.  In desperation, at midnight I woke up the Inn Manager and he came down and cleaned up the mess.  A few weeks later I and my two roommates all got a job bandagging truck tires.  This is like recapping, only when you do it to truck tires it is called bandagging.  I got that job by faking a British accent during the interview with Bruce Taylor, the owner of Penn Aire Tire.   A few days later when Bruce visited me in the plant he inquired what had happened to my accent.

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