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

In time we exhausted, and dominated the market in our part of the state, and I decided to enter the market of a major metropolitan area about 170 miles away.  

I spent about six months doing market research on the cheap, which meant asking what local fast food restaurants were paying their help in order to get a frame of reference what the current wage rates were in this new city.  At the time most fast food restaurants were paying $3.45 per hour, so I based my quotations on that wage rate.  What I did not know, was that at the time, there were over ten million square feet of new office space under construction in this city.  When all that office space was completed and was occupied, there was going to be a major surge in the demand for new housekeepers.  With the supply of labor more or less fixed, and the demand for cleaners surging, the result was quite predictable:  a surge in the price of labor.  Which meant that all those new contracts I had just sold in this city were going to lose money, because we were going to be unable to staff the buildings at the wage rates we had quoted, and if we raised the wages, we could not raise the prices, and so were going to take a serious financial hit.

 We tried to hold the line on our wages at the level we had quoted the new business at:  remember we were in the cleaning business, and labor is by far the largest cost of doing business.  As we tried to hold our wages at the levels we had quoted the business at, the competition for labor was intensifying in the city, and our competitors were slowly offering more money.  And so were the fast food restaurants, and every other enterprise that operates with entry-level labor.  I would often pass the same Wendy’s unit on my way to work, and they constantly had Help Wanted signs in the window, and I noticed that the offered rate of pay went up about $.25 per hour every two months or so.  The significance of this had not quite seeped into my consciousness, but I woke up at a trade show in St. Louis later that same year.  I was talking over cocktails with one of my Jewish competitors from back in my home state, and he said about one 22-story office building we cleaned:  “My cousins run that building.  Don’t you think I’d have that contract if I wanted it?  Why do you think I don’t have it?  Because I don’t want it, because I can’t make any money at it.” 

In the early days in this new city, we attempted to stick with our anticipated wage rates, although such were no longer realistic.  The only people who were responding to our Want Ads in the newspaper were the dregs that no one else wanted.  You tend to lower your standards when you are desperate for warm bodies.  We used to joke during this period about subjecting our applicants to the Foggy Mirror Test:  hold a mirror up to their mouth and ask them to breathe on it.  If it fogs up, they’re hired.  Of course, you pay quite a price when you hire these people.  In one city, we had a contract to clean a 22-story office building, and one night when I walked in about 5:30, my supervisor was standing in the lobby, freaking out, because not one of her nineteen employees had shown up.  I took off my suit jacket and tie, and my supervisor and I spent the next 14 hours removing the trash from the trash baskets in that building and restocking the paper supplies in the restrooms.  I remember we hauled out 112 large bags of trash between the two of us.  We finished up as the tenants started pouring in the next morning.

I had been thrilled with all of our new business in this city.  I was thrilled with the rising numbers of our revenues and employees.  I had felt a rush of pleasure at our successes.  It came as a stab of pain when I realized we were like the man selling millions of oranges, and losing 1/4 cent on each orange, but he was going to make it up in volume.  Another lesson learned:  It’s the money left on the table when all the dealing’s done that matters.  Don’t get too impressed with the wrong numbers.

At the very inception of the business, I had worn all the hats:  cleaner, supervisor, sales rep, buyer, management, bookkeeping, secretary, you name it, I did it all.  Little by little as the enterprise grew I had to take off more and more of these hats.  One of the last hats to come off was that of sales rep.  This was partly because as the founder and organizer of the enterprise, I was its best promoter, and also because I loved doing it.  Eventually though, even that hat had to come off, and it was time to find a sales rep.  As always, I looked around at my existing employees to see if there was anyone with potential sales ability.  I thought I had my answer in an employee we’ll call Peggy (not her real name).  She had been with me for several years, as cleaner and then as supervisor.  I spent several months organizing our sales effort for someone other than myself, and then teaching her, taking her with me, teaching her how to put the numbers together, etc.  Peggy worked partly in our home office territory, and partly in this new city where we weren’t doing too well.  I needed for her to find new business to replace some of our existing business we were sure to lose, and needed to lose if we couldn’t negotiate new, and higher prices to reflect the rising cost of labor.

Peggy faithfully turned in her reports, and developed close relationships with our existing clients, which was important because she would need them as references in order to get new clients.  She did this quite well, in fact much more so than I ever expected.  She frequented our clients in their homes socially and got to know their families.  Peggy was attractive but not beautiful.  She was married and had kids at home.

One day Peggy called to say she had been to the hospital because she had been in an automobile accident.  Someone had rear-ended her while she was stopped at a traffic light.  A short time later, Peggy  showed up with a neck brace on and informed me the small truck that had hit her was owned by a company, and she had found a lawyer and was suing this company for a million dollars.  She assured me she was not filing a Worker’s Compensation claim, which would have damaged our company’s rating and raised our costs.  Over the course of the next few months, she continued to ask me to assign her exclusively to the city 170 miles from where she lived, and I continued to tell her I couldn’t financially justify doing that, since we had territories to consider much closer to home.  Finally one day Peggy  asks me to go to lunch with her, and she shows me a photograph of her and the contact person for one of our largest clients, a middle-aged married man, both of them partially clothed in a bedroom.   She then tells me she has been having an affair with this man for some time, and this was the reason why she continued to ask for reassignment to the large city, for this would provide business “cover” with her husband as to where she was for such extended periods of time, and why.  So she was asking for my complicity, not for business reasons, but a very personal one.

A few days later I declined her request.  She promptly filed a Workers Compensation claim.  Eventually I met with her new boyfriend, my client.  We met in a restaurant, and he asked if I had any tape recorders on me.  I told him no, and then he said he was sorry Peggy  had ever told me about their affair and put me in the middle of it.  He said he was acutely uncomfortable doing business with me because if I reported him to his boss, he could lose his job over this.  He said he would honor my existing contracts, but when they expired he would not renew them.  In exchange for this, he asked me to promise I would not squeal on him.  I agreed, but I felt that I had been fucked and not even kissed.  A few months later he broke his word and canceled our business, so I went to his boss, a major player in a Fortune Five Hundred company, and handed him my paperwork.  He sat there for an hour and a half reading it all, looked up and asked me two questions:“One of our officers has compromised the corporation.  What do you want me to do about it?”

In my judgment, he and his subordinate were tight, and apart from this behavior his subordinate was competent and would not easily be replaced.  I therefore responded to this man that in my opinion if I requested disciplinary action, I would create resentments at several levels in my client’s organization which would in time cost me the loss of the business anyway.  So I was not requesting any action be taken, and I was going to terminate my contract.  I was being a realist about the matter, but I wanted ”the boss” to know the real reasons I was leaving, and that it was not due to performance problems on my organization’s part.  Obviously there was no way his subordinate was going to tell the truth about why a reliable contractor was walking away from valuable business.  The subordinate was going to have to fabricate a cover story, and the cover story would not be favorable to us.

The second thing this executive wanted to know was, ‘Had I banged Peggy too?’ I hadn’t.  I just thought it was interesting that he asked.  I hadn’t expected that.

So we lost the business, about $200,000 per year.  For a long time I never heard from Peggy.  Then one day she called to tell me that in the judgment of her attorney, she was going to need  a strong character reference from me as her last employer of record in order to successfully conclude her lawsuit.  I asked her who was representing the defendant, and she told me.  A short while later, I went to see the defense attorneys, and seated around their conference table, told them Christmas was about to come early for them. 

I met with Peggy, armed with a hidden microphone and small recorder.  We had a long chat in which she told me many details of her lawsuit and her personal life.  She told me her lawsuit included $50,000 for compensation for loss of consortium with her husband due to the accident.  It didn’t seem to occur to her as significant at all that the accident had not interfered with loss of consortium with her lover.  She spilled her guts, and I took the tape to the defendent’s law firm, they transcribed it, and presented the transcription to Peggy and her attorney.  The parties settled quickly out of court for an undisclosed amount that I was informed may have covered her “medical expenses.”

After Peggy was gone, I put the sales hat back on myself and started making prospect calls.  One prospect told me about the last time Peggy had called on him, wearing a very short skirt with a deep slit on the side.  He said Peggy spread her legs suggestively and asked what she had to do to get the contract for his building.  She then told him anything he saw that he wanted was his for the asking. At the time I learned of these developments, I remember being surprised.  The world has changed a lot since then, and it takes a lot more to shock me these days.  And let’s face it, sex for resources is one of the oldest games known to the human species.  Peggy hardly invented that behavior.

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

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

Sometimes it took considerable creativity and persistence to win a potential client’s business.  At one point in my business life I had lost a lot of business, was in a world of hurt, and knew I needed to close a significant sale soon or file bankruptcy.  I had been working on this one contract for a year and a half, sending letters, leaving messages, and being generally ignored.  Suddenly one day I got a phone call, they expressed a desire to visit some of my existing clients and to my office.  They wanted to make sure I was big enough to handle their business (the contract would ultimately be worth about $30,000 to $50,000 per month.)  At the time my whole business was smaller than their contract, but I knew I couldn’t let them know that.  I was running my business from my century-house, an unrestored, dilapidated place badly in need of repair.  My office was in the basement of this house, where the ancient floor had ugly yellow linoleum and sloped about ten inches from one side of the house to the other.  I had painted the inside walls of this basement with whitewash, and I had a few filing cabinets and some ugly desks there, and one part-time secretary.  Upstairs I had converted a two-car garage into a living room, with two windows facing the driveway.

On the morning the prospective client was due to arrive, I hired four white, unlettered vans, and I hired four temporary laborers.  I brought them to my property an hour early, told them to back up the vans to an old barn at the back of my driveway that was filled with a lot of junk, and told them to load up some of this junk onto each van, drive around anywhere for ten minutes, and then return to the barn, unload the junk, reload the same junk, and drive around again.  I told them to do this until I told them to stop.  When the prospective client’s managers arrived, the first thing they remarked about was how modest my office was.  I told them I could easily have something more substantial to look at, but of course it would be my clients who would have to pay for it.  They said Good Point!  While they were partaking of coffee and pastries from a table strategically placed by the windows of my living room, they could not help but look out the window and notice the continual stream of white van traffic in and out of my driveway and all the loading and unloading going on.  They commented that I “had one hell of an operation” out there.  We spent a couple hours touring a small account I had nearby, and they went home satisfied that they had found the right supplier for their company.  And they had.  We provided a lengthy list of services to their company for years, earning several million dollars from them in the process.

Working at Watchtower headquarters my exposure to the IRS had been the absolute minimal.  Having virtually no income and no expenses, my tax returns were done for me and were exceedingly brief.  So my first real experience with the IRS came many years later, when my bookkeeper quit unexpectedly.  When I cleaned out her desk, I noticed a pack of unopened envelopes held together with a rubber band.  They were all from the IRS, and when I opened them I discovered to my dismay that we had not paid payroll taxes for quite a few months, the IRS had discovered this and was giving us about ten days to fork over about $140,000 or they would shut us down.  With my heart in my mouth, I looked up the IRS in the phone book, found their address, and went down there for a meeting with destiny.  Eventually I was assigned an agent, an older woman who wore the most unseemly broad-brimmed hats imaginable, contraptions that vaguely resembled a Mexican sombrero.  She peered out at me from the shadows of her hat and asked what I owed.  I told her what I thought, and she agreed.  Then she asked me if I was making money.  I said no, for that was about the time we were losing money on large contracts due to a shortage of labor.  She asked if I could change that.  I said I thought so.  Then she told me I was the smallest of her caseload, and I needed to go out and make a lot of money and then come back to see her in six months.  I thought, well, that was nice of her.  So that’s what I did.  I came back in six months and learned that she had retired.  My case then got caught in a jurisdictional dispute between two IRS districts, and by the time they settled their argument, I had paid them off.  Of my $140,000 bill, over $30,000 of it was in penalties.  I wrote the IRS a 100-page letter complete with a table of contents and appendix requesting abatement of the penalties, and in fact they did cancel about $19,000 worth of penalties.  I wondered at the time if they ever actually read my 100-page letter, or gave me the abatement just so they wouldn’t have to.  I wasn’t about to ask however.

As the founder of a company takes off the various hats he wore at the outset of the enterprise, it becomes imperative to focus on staff development, that is, developing depth on the management bench.  If you neglect this aspect of growth, it gets really lonely on that bench, talking to yourself all the time.  It was largely due to this loneliness, and my desire to develop mentor relationships with those who could help me, I developed a Board of Directors to advise me.  One of the Board members was a faculty member of a local Vocational School in charge of their Adult Education program.  After several years on my Board and impressed with our growth as a company, he volunteered to take  a one-year sabbatical from the school if I would hire him on as Vice President of Operations for that one year at a matching salary.  I agreed, for I knew I desperately needed help at the top.

We both knew within a couple months that this whole thing was a bad idea.  I remember visiting a former client with my friend to do an exit interview, i.e. find out why we had lost their business and where we had failed.  The client explained in embarrassing detail all of our shortcomings.  As we left the place, my friend and V.P. of Operations commented “I could have saved that account, but I don’t have to take that from anybody.”  My poor friend who taught Business Education for budding entrepreneurs at the local school was getting his first exposure to free markets and discovered he didn’t find the sovereignty of the consumer to his taste.  Belatedly, I remembered comments he had made before about the advantages of tenure at his school.  He had even bragged on one occasion that he ‘would have to rape one of the students on video camera to get fired.’  I remember having laughed at his remark, not taking him seriously.  I should have.  He left my company and went back to education, from which he subsequently retired.

That was not my only attempt to look for academic qualifications for senior management staff.  On another occasion I hired a young Ghanian immigrant who had just recently graduated with a phD in Staff Development from a large university.  I thought, ‘Perfect’, just what we need, only to discover that this guy’s idea of staff development was to study the issues for a few years and then write a scholarly paper about it.  He was incapable of organizing three men in a closet, and a sense of urgency was a totally foreign concept for him.  I’m sure he is presently in charge of some large governmental agency back in his native Ghana, and a frequent attendee at large international conferences addressing global issues.

After having been in business for well over a quarter century, it is still hard for me to handle a lawsuit with equanimity.  After all, I work very hard at doing the right thing, more so, it seems to me than most.  So I take it very personally when I get sued, because a lawsuit in business almost always implies some form of willful negligence or heedless disregard for others, something I have never been guilty of.

It seems to me that plaintiff’s attorneys are modern pirates looking for wealth to plunder.  Like politicians, they masquerade as altruists, doing all “for others” and for “society”.  It is an inversion of values when those who produce are pronounced greedy and selfish, and those who confiscate and plunder are selfless and protectors of the unfortunate.  Our tolerance for these pirates is a subject of scorn in much of Western Europe.

My most extreme lawsuit was when I was sued for $19,000,000.  I was one of six co-defendents, and there were about a dozen high-powered lawyers involved in the defense, and one rather sleazy plaintiff’s attorney.  I say sleazy because it became apparent very early in the discovery process that he had few facts and was engaged in a lot of fishing and name calling.  I thought he was lazy, and his shoes always needed shined.  He was always late, and he always looked like he had slept in his clothes the night before.  When we met during the process called “Deposition”, he would ask a question, and you would hear the word “Objection!” echo around the long table a dozen times as each defense attorney had to voice his own version of the word for the record.  When it came time to discuss “settlement”, which is what they call the process whereby they shake down the insurance companies who are paying the exorbitant fees of all the defense attorneys, the defense attorneys simply discussed behind closed doors what the least amount they could offer that would make this guy (the plaintiff’s attorney) go away.  The conversation, as usual, had nothing to do with justice or injury or right and wrong.  As a matter of fact, the plaintiffs didn’t even get discussed.  It was assumed by all that the case was totally without merit, even though it had dragged on procedurally in the courts for five or six years, all of which worked in the favor of the plaintiff’s attorney, for the longer it dragged on, the higher the expenses for the defense and the greater the desire of the insurance companies to settle.  Of course the defendents’ (including me) attorneys settled, and we, the defendents, could not be told what the amounts were.  I added up the attorneys’ fees for just one deposition session, and the total came to more than $10,000 for a few short hours.  My total insurance coverage at the time was $300,000 so this whole case had a surreal aspect to it for me, because no matter how many zeroes you added after $300,000, the result was the same:  I was broke and dead in the water if I lost.  And by that time in my business life, I was fully aware that winning and losing had little to do with right and wrong.  It is a strange feeling knowing that whether or not you keep your home and your ability to support your family lies in the hands of some stranger, an attorney you don’t know, hired by your insurance company, to defend you against charges you can’t believe you’re hearing, for amounts that defy comprehension.  Objection, objection, objection, objection. . .

After almost ten years of being in business, after innumerable setbacks and mistakes, after opening up my first major branch office in another city, with over a hundred employees and inadequate and uncommitted management talent spread too thin, I was losing more money than I ever dreamed possible, and cash flow was a nightmare.  I owed the IRS money, payroll deposit money, and they will take your firstborn child for that offense.  This was 1985 and all the new computers and software we had just purchased weren’t working, and I wasn’t getting the accurate, timely reports needed to turn things around.  It was scary, and my wife, who had been my bookkeeper for years, decided this would be a good time to bail out and be a full-time mother.  The woman I hired as her replacement left to start her own cleaning business and compete with us.  And yes, it was right about then that the local Circuit Overseer decided to have a serious talk with me about my not devoting enough time to the door-to-door canvassing required of all Jehovah’s Witnesses.  He was particularly disturbed because I had recently been  asked by Bethel headquarters staff to give a half hour presentation to about 20,000 attendees at a recent convention at the Richfield (Cleveland) Coliseum, and this while devoting less than ten hours per month in the door-to-door evangelizing activity.  Brother Callai was a man of average intelligence who probably was promoted to Circuit Overseer as a reward for his dogged adherence to policy.  I’m sure he was more than a little annoyed by my prominence locally in spite of my abysmally poor performance evangelically.  I was still an Elder in the local congregation, so he pointed out to me that unless my numbers improved dramatically and quickly, he would recommend my removal as an Elder.

I thought about this for a few days, and then I approached another elder within Brother Callai’s  circuit and asked him to join me as a witness (without a capital “W”) in a meeting with Callai.   At the meeting I told Callai that we must not be reading from the same textbook (meaning The Bible), because the copy I had said that all that God required from his servants was “wholesouled devotion”, meaning the best your soul was capable of in your given circumstances.  I explained what I had been dealing with in the business world, and the setbacks incurred trying to earn a living, and I asked him by what authority he had the right to demand of me more than God did.  Poor Brother Callai was mortified, and he insisted on us joining him in prayer while he prayed for God’s forgiveness, and mine, for his error.  Walking out of that meeting I knew I would never knock on another door as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses again.  I had no feelings about it whatsoever, no anger, no disgust, no annoyance.  No nothing.  Just total indifference.  I was done.  I had been praying for many years to someone who either wasn’t there or wasn’t listening; I had been defending doctrines I didn’t believe and policies I couldn’t practice, I had been rewriting speeches of church leaders to make them palatable and comprehensible to the rank and file.  I couldn’t do it anymore, none of it.  I was done pretending.  I was no longer a believer.  I wasn’t sure what exactly I was, other than a businessman in a lot of trouble.

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.

Some of my most painful business lessons came from the legal system.  I was unaware that a large group of under-employed attorneys had invented a brand new field of litigation that came to be known as contract employment versus employment-at-will.  The theory apparently went something like this:  if an employer said something to an employee that could even vaguely be construed as an assurance of continued employment, it could be considered a binding verbal contract.  Let’s say, one day during a discussion with an employee that you, as the employer say something intended to show appreciation and encouragement for recent good work on their part such as “Keep up the good work.  You have a real future here”, and then let’s say that a few months later their attitude changes and their work goes south and you end up terminating their employment; they could now sue you for termination without just cause, because implied in your encouraging verbal statement months before was a guarantee of some sort of continued employement.  From that point on, in the eyes of the law, you could only discharge an employee for “just cause”.  Well , how hard can that be?  Who would want to terminate someone for an unjust cause?  The problem is, “for just cause” in the eyes of whom?  Of course it was appropriate in your mind to discharge them; you were probably fed up with their behavior, or taking a lot of grief from them and spending 80% of your time trying to correct them and taking heat from both your boss and the customer to get the situation fixed.  But the problem is, their discharge is never  for “just cause” in their own eyes.  When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘I got fired today, and by God, I deserved it.’  So now, under this concept of implied employment contract, this discharged employee can challenge his discharge in court, and you are obliged to defend your decision to let him go.  To a jury.  What if you get a jury that buys into the Hollywood stereotype that businessmen are greedy and corrupt and out to get the little guy?  You may successfully defend yourself, but it’s going to cost you money, probably a lot of it, and the plaintiff’s attorney knows that.  So he launches a paper battle that runs up the bill for the defense.  At some point the insurance company will capitulate and pay off, just to contain their spiraling legal costs.

I learned that it was dangerous to tell new employees they were on a thirty-day probation period at the beginning of their employment, because in the eyes of developing case law, a probationary period ending implied some sort of permanent status beginning.  In the absence of written policy to the contrary, it was wide open to interpretation what the exact nature of that permanent status was, but it came to be interpreted that you, as an employer, could not simply tell an employee you didn’t want to work with them any more, but you were now legally obliged to justify, in a manner that would satisfy a jury in worst-case scenario, what the reasons were for ‘letting them go.’

Such case law is an example of how ideas invade a culture by stealth, like a virus.  At the beginning such concepts are perceived as “extreme” but over time they become the norm.  Over time the employment arrangement ceases to be two parties trading with each other, and employment becomes a “right”, an entitlement, and if the employer as the Buyer no longer finds it in his best interests to continue to buy from, and pay for, the services of a particular employee, he has to defend his actions before a third party, because the act of termination is now seen as an infringement of the “rights” of the employee as the “injured party”.  Rarely however, does an employee have any such obligation to defend their decision to leave employment.  Unless there is a written employment contract stating otherwise, individual employees are free to quit selling their services to an employer, for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason.

When you were terminating an employee for a behavioral problem, it was almost always simpler than it was when terminating them for poor job performance.  If someone got in a fight at work with another employee, it didn’t require a lot of explanation why you asked them to leave.  They always knew it was coming.  But when it came to not being satisfied with their performance, it quickly became a lot more complicated.

As my embryonic organization began to grow and take form, I took my best cleaners and promoted them to supervisors.  I, and they, quickly learned that labor and supervision are very different kinds of work.  When you are promoted to supervision, you tend to lose some friends in the workplace, and you are no longer one of ‘the gang’.  I also learned that the longest mile in the world is from the mind to the muscle, and that people with a lifetime labor orientation often have great difficulty making the transition to being a supervisor.  Their initial solution to almost every problem is usually a knee-jerk effort to work their way out of the problem, with physical work, a solution that always worked for them before.  The problem with that is that as the organization grows, you can only work your way (physically) out of so many situations before you have run out of both time and energy.  When you have run out of you, you have run out of future.   Even when you are exhausted by your endeavors, it still seems easier to just work harder and harder, rather than think your way out of a problem, and by multiplying yourself through other people.  Jumping in and rolling up your sleeves and doing the job yourself always seemed to you before to be the shortest line between two points. 

Also supervision of necessity involves at times trying to get people to do what they don’t want to do.  It can be as simple as trying to stop your cleaners from yanking on vacuum cleaner cords because they are too lazy or rushed to go over to the wall plug and pull it out properly.  By yanking on the cord, they break off the third ‘ground’ prong, requiring a replacement of the plug, and place themselves at risk of electric shock by continuing to use a piece of now damaged equipment because they are in no hurry to tell their supervisor that they damaged it.

Since most of my cleaners were women, most of my supervisors were women promoted from the ranks.  Most of them were mothers, and they invariably tended to supervise in exactly the same manner as they had parented:  endless, usually  fruitless repetition, until they got mad and raised their voice with the subordinate, out of sheer frustration.  They would frequently make threats of dire consequences if the subordinate did not shape up, but they rarely carried out their threats.  I called this the “Baby-sitting Theory of Management” or Mom-ism.    Eventually, when under pressure from above to correct a situation, they–you guessed it–rolled up their sleeves and did the job themselves.  “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”  Well, it might work with a kid or two, but when you are responsible for dozens of employees, it quickly becomes evident there aren’t enough hours in a day to “pick up” after them all; problems multiply, quality deteriorates, and the overworked supervisor starts to burn out.  It is at this point that they either learn to manage, or drop out.

A problem develops when a supervisor’s ego is heavily involved with his/her position and status in the organization, particularly when they have been promoted to their level of incompetence and you have to do something about it.  In a rapidly growing organization, it is frequently possible for a manager’s job to outstrip the manager’s ability to keep up with it.   This is a classical performance problem.  Men and women may handle this situation differently, but in my company, most of my managers and supervisors were women, because they were promoted from the ranks of the women who came into my business as cleaners. When this lead person is a woman, you can expect to see what I call “Queen of the Herd” syndrome.  I gave it this name from the behavior of cows.  Every herd of cows selects a member of the herd to be queen, and it is this same cow that leads the herd out to pasture in the morning, and back to the barn at night.  When the Queen eventually gets deposed by a younger, up-and-coming cow, she gets neurotic and stops giving milk.  That’s when she goes to the butcher.  Humans behave similarly, especially in the cleaning business, which is labor-intensive, and is composed of mostly women.  Status within a group, any group, is extremely important to most people.

I had such a situation with a young lady who had been with me a number of years.  She had started as a cleaner with me when I was tiny, and due to very hard work eventually ended up as an Operations Manager with half a dozen supervisors reporting to her over an area of over a hundred miles.  She was still baby-sitting rather than managing, and was either unwilling or unable to make the tough people decisions that management requires.  She did not hold her people accountable for results.   Management is bloody and is no place for wimps.  When you talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk, your subordinates figure this out, just like any teenager does.  They keep you on their radar screen, but don’t really bestir themselves until they know they have to.  She had become too close personally to her subordinates, and had lost whatever objectivity she might once have had.  Quality problems and customer complaints were proliferating, and it was clear to me that while she thought she deserved kudos for being exhausted from putting out all the fires, she was in fact, my arsonist.  I met with her and told her I wanted to divide her job in half, that there would be no loss of pay or benefits; that we were growing, and that the job had become too big for one person.  She could not accept this, and the perceived loss of status that this change would entail.  I told her the alternative was to continue as we had been, but if the business issues did not turn around, I would have to terminate her employment.  She would not accept my suggested alternative, things did not improve, and I terminated her.

She apparently persuaded her supervisors, who were also her friends, to walk out with her, and for one horrible night we had massive confusion and even a few poor cleaners locked into their customer’s buildings.  During the next few months she began a telephone campaign to my cleaners and customers, neither of whom wanted to be involved.  Finally, she sued me for wrongful termination.

Our small company, now about one hundred strong, ended up hiring a very high-priced labor law firm out of Washington, D.C. to handle our case.  At the time this type of lawsuit was rather unusual.  We ended up paying about $15,000 in legal fees to defend ourselves, and the former supervisor finally dropped her suit when we began asking too many questions about her past dealings with Welfare.  At the time we were doing almost $1 million in business a year, with a 3% profit margin before taxes, so defending ourselves in this lawsuit wiped out about one half the profits earned by the entire company for a full year.

The business lesson I learned is that people’s ego and self-esteem and self-image can become all wrapped up in their job status, and when this happens they are far more traumatized by a change in their job status or the loss of their job.  They can be very vindictive, highly emotional, and unpredictable in their behavior.  They can even be violent and physically endanger others.

I learned even more from another, rather similar lawsuit that came along later, when another supervisor we had discharged also sued us for wrongful discharge.  It eventually went to trial, and on the day of the trial the jury was selected, and I am seated in a small room with my lawyer, who informs me the judge wants me to settle with the complainant.  The judge suggested we offer the plaintiff $3000.  My attorney explained to me that we would spend more than that per day in the trial, which would probably last three days.  I was outraged and said no, I didn’t want to settle for any amount because neither I nor my company had done anything wrong.  My attorney explained that it was a matter of economics, not of justice.  I said I’d rather spend the money.   I was offended by the whole issue.  I thought it clearly was a matter of extortion.  Well, my attorney took my response back to the judge, and when he came back said the judge was not happy with my decision and was not accepting it.  He “strongly encouraged” me to rethink it.  I knew my arm was being twisted, and I also knew that if I refused to go along with the judge, he would find ways to punish us in the courtroom; my attorney made it clear there was no reasonable alternative, so I agreed.  He went back to the judge, and a few moments later reappeared, said the matter was handled, and now we would proceed to the trial!  I said What!!!  He explained the judge was up for reelection, there were twelve jurors who were prospective voters out there in the courtroom, and the judge wanted to put on a good show for them.  So court would convene, the jurors would be given their instructions, there would be a brief recess, and then the judge would inform the jurors that a settlement had been reached and the case was over.  He wanted to put on a dog-and-pony show for the jurors before we left.  And that is what he did.

Once we had a contract with a racetrack.  We were making money and we thought we had a good track record (no pun intended) with the client.  We never actually met the owner(s), but their representatives that we did do business with sometimes left the impression of being sleazy.  One day we got a very brief, and totally unexpected letter from the General Manager of the racetrack canceling our contract.  When I followed up with the client, I asked them who they were going to hire to replace us, he gave me a name of a competitor I had never heard of before.  Within a day or so, one of my managers who oversaw our operations at the racetrack resigned from our company.  I thought this was quite a coincidence, and after a little investigation found out my manager had formed his own company and had cut his own deal with the customer to replace us.  The only problem was that we had a written non-compete employment contract with our manager prohibiting him from doing exactly this.  Our contract with our client also prohibited them from doing this.  Both of these contracts had been entered into voluntarily.  Since the racetrack was in another state, I was going to have to hire an attorney from that state.  I called the state attorney referral service, and as luck would have it, we were referred to an attorney who had retired a couple years before as the State Racing Commissioner.  This guy knew the racing business in his state inside out!!

When I went to see him, we had a conversation I will never forget.  He said to me, “So what’s your complaint, Johnny?”  I told him.  He gets up from behind his desk, walks over and closes the door to his office, goes back to his chair, and says:  “Let me tell you about racing in the good ol’ state of —.  You can have anything you want at the racetrack.  If you want drugs, you can get it at the track.  If you want sex, you can get it at the track.  If you want to play some numbers, you can get it at the track.  If you want someone murdered, you can get it at the track.  All it takes is money.  Now you say you want justice.  For $2000, I’ll see to it by 4 p.m. this afternoon that the judge signs an order forbidding your manager from working at the racetrack, and if he does, he’ll be thrown in jail.  For $5,000, your manager will never work at the track again as long as he lives.  And for $10,000 I’ll get you your contract back.  Now, how much justice can you afford today?”

I told him I could afford $2000, and he kept his promise.  By a few minutes after four that afternoon, I had an order signed by the judge prohibiting my former manager from working at the track for another six months, the time period specified in my contract with him.  I couldn’t afford the $10,000 to get the contract back, and I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to have murdered.  When I went back to see the General Manager of the racetrack (who was also the Law Director of a nearby city) and presented a copy of the judge’s orders to him, he said, “All you’ve done is prevented me from doing business with who I want to do business with.  That won’t get you your contract back.”  And of course, he was right. 

I had just learned another great truth of free enterprise:  no contract will ever keep a customer if they no longer want to do business with you.  I had also begun to learn another important point:  Business trades hands for lots of reasons.  I was in the janitorial business, a very mature industry, a commodity business.  We always had so many competitors that it was easy for our clients to replace us.  So generally our clients wanted to do business with their buddies and often their own ethnic groups.  I was learning that you do business with individuals, not companies, and they wanted to deal on a regular basis with people at their own level, from similar backgrounds, someone they could relate to.  This carried at least as much weight, and sometimes a whole lot more weight, than say, what level of service your organization was providing.  This was very hard for me to handle.  All my life I had been an idealist, and this didn’t fit with my vision of how the world should be.  I thought that if I worked hard and produced a better quality product or service, the rewards should go to me and my company.  We were committed to excellence and believed that if you accept mediocrity you’d never get past it.  It hurt my feelings to find our hard work and determination  thwarted by the mere fact that my client or prospect was looking for someone Italian, or Jewish, or whatever.  I mention these two ethnic groups, because in the areas where I worked, these are the two groups where I bumped into this barrier  the most often.  But never directly, never in so many words.  It was a bitter pill to swallow, but the fact of the matter was it was their money and they could trade with whomever they wanted, for a good reason, for a bad reason, or for no reason at all.  Unlike my employees, I had no special rights.  In most cases my customers came from middle management of their respective organizations and they were playing with someone else’s money.  So it is understandable that they would use their position of power over purchasing to send business to their friends.  It is a very disciplined organization that seeks value over fraternity.  The good news is that when you finally get such an organization as a client, if you do provide superior service, you are far less likely to lose their business for some frivolous reason.

Some organizations, in an effort to create and maintain value-driven purchasing, resort to mind-numbing bidding procedures, with huge RFPs (Request for Proposal).  Buying from the lowest bidder was not done merely to get the best price; it was most often an effort by a customer to keep their own organization honest.    Some even thought that by replacing human judgment with a number, the amount of the bid, they could guarantee objectivity in the awarding of contracts.  My experience is that one should never underestimate the ingenuity of managers intent on thwarting company policy to achieve their own personal ends.  Once I had a customer threaten me with the loss of our contract with them unless I joined his new church.  I didn’t join, and sure enough, he canceled our business with his company.  Sometimes a Buyer would let us know, with a very careful choice of words, how much money would have to pass under the table in order to get a contract.  This most often happened with government contracts.  In Northeast Ohio it happened so often we stopped bidding on government work altogether.  There was enough honest work to go around without getting our hands dirty. 

In one town we served, there was a very prominent Italian mall developer, and his organization would repeatedly ask us for quotes on the cleaning of his headquarters organization.  We would inquire of the middle manager handling the matter for the developer why they were considering making a change, and the answer always was that they were dissatisfied with the quality of the service provided by their current vendor.  Well, everyone in town knew the current vendor was another Italian who had grown up with the mall developer’s son, and they were close friends.  A little more investigation would reveal that they had recently quarreled, and the developer’s son was pissed, and wanted the cleaning contract to go out to bid.  We, and any number of other interested contractors would submit bids, only to be told eventually that the developer had decided to stay with his existing vendor.  We all understood what this had meant:  they had kissed and made up.  This happened repeatedly with this one organization over the years, and so after a while we quit providing quotes.  But we heard through the grapevine that this same Italian competitor, when competing against us at other locations where the client was Italian would pointedly ask the client if they wouldn’t prefer to deal with a paisan, and the answer was frequently yes, they did.  Mom had lied.  Life did not always reward hard work, and who you knew frequently was more important than what you knew.  Eventually we heard through the trade association that cleaning was 25% of our business, and the politics of business was 75%.  We also heard that “a dirty building could lose you a contract, but a clean building wouldn’t necessarily keep one.”  After all these years in the business, I wouldn’t disagree.  There are many reasons other than the stated ones why business changes hands.  As a footnote to this, I have to say that there were enough companies that really did value excellence over fraternity that we grew and prospered, and eventually dominated our market.  At one point, the Italian contractor mentioned above sent word to me through a third party that if I didn’t leave his contracts alone, I was going to end up wearing cement shoes in the local river.  We ignored this threat and stayed focused on business.  A few years later he went out of business, for reasons unknown.

 By relating these experiences, I am not implying that most of the people we dealt with were dishonest or corrupt.  The fact of the matter is most of the business people I dealt with over the years were excellent, principled, and a joy to work with.  We got pretty good at picking our customers, just like they picked us.  We realized that not all business is good business, and some of it is simply not worth the hassle.  However, pain can be an excellent teacher, and we always tried to learn from our failures and painful experiences.   After a while you get a pretty thick skin, and you also gain a lot of confidence as you learn how to handle adversity.  As my friend Dick McKee once told me, “Sons should not be deprived of the adversity that made men of their fathers.”  Building a successful business was one of the most challenging things I have ever done, and every day you start all over again; it  requires a lot of self-discipline and the willingness to delay gratification, patience, people skills, critical thinking ability, the capacity to think on your feet and the courage to act decisively.  Emotionally it can be both frustrating and enormously rewarding.  It is not for the weak at heart, and if you are looking for love, I strongly recommend getting a dog.

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 $90/month corporate office 1981

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. 

 I went to all the sessions and greedily lapped up all the information.  I was a sponge.  When I came back, I had more questions than answers.  I knew I needed a mentor, someone to guide me.  While in Orlando, I had asked around about what this trade association was, and who ran it.  I didn’t know anything about the nature of trade associations.  Well, it had members in 25 or 30 countries, including most of the largest operators in the world.  They had a Board of Directors that ran things, and this Board was made up of contractors that had been nominated by an anonymous Nominating Committee that met once a year.  Board members served for three years, were unpaid, and traveled to Board functions at their own expense.  Not a very good deal.  But I figured if I could get nominated to the Board of Directors, I could sit in the Boardroom during meetings like a mouse and learn from these people what I needed to learn.

So I went home and thought, what I need here is exposure.  I need to get my name out there.  I am a nobody.  Well, what do I know how to do?  The answer was obvious, I know how to speak and to write.  So I called the trade journals and asked if they needed writers.  Little did I know that all trade journals need writers, especially free ones.  So I made committments to write on all kinds of cleaning and management issues.  I didn’t need to know about all this stuff, I just had to engage in some journalistic research and then write the papers.  Which I did.  So in the next couple years I got in print fairly frequently, more so I’m sure, than any other contractor out there.  And I always got my byline, John Bechtel, and the name of my company and my location.  When my articles started to get published, I ordered lots of extra copies, and started giving them out to prospective customers to show them what an authority I was on this subject and that.  I got a contract for a whole chain of grocery stores after I wrote an article about how cleaning grocery stores was no place for amateurs.  No one was more of an amateur at the time than I was.  I had already mastered the first rule of journalism:  Pretend you know more about something than you really do.

It was a couple years later that the telephone call came.  I was sitting at my desk beside my standpipe, when the phone rang, and this lady named Carol Dean says she was the Executive Vice President of the Building Service Contractors Association International at a meeting of the Nominating Committee in Toronto, Canada, and I had been nominated for a seat on the Board of Directors.  She explained the terms, and I asked her what I could anticipate in the way of out-of-pocket expenses to accept this position.  She replied $5000 to $10,000 per year for three years.  That was about equivalent to 60 to 100 percent of my annual gross salary.  I tried to be cool and not gulp.  I asked her when I could get back to her, and she said she had to know within a few hours.  I went to lunch and then called her back and accepted.  When I told Barbara about it, she flipped and asked where I thought I was going to get that kind of money.  I told her I didn’t know, but I would find a way.

So they had heard about me.  The Mouse That Roared.  This pathetic, tiny operator in a rural county of Ohio who wrote all these articles.  And as long as I kept my mouth shut in the Boardroom, no one would ever know how little I knew, or how much I was learning.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to pay for it.  I was still going to night school at the local university, and sleeping through half the classes.  Barbara wanted to know why I didn’t apply for a real job at the General Motors assembly plant that had some openings; her brother-in-law Roy had applied and been accepted.  She also had a lot to say about the fact that the water pipes in our apartment were frozen and we were washing the dishes in the bathtub.  Barbara wasn’t the type to suffer in silence.

My fortunes began to change when Alden Foxhall showed up.  He had called a few times, some pesky guy trying to sell some product to clean carpet with.  I had no money, I didn’t know how to clean carpet, and I had my hands more than full just keeping my few cleaning people on the job.  Alden was quite insistent, however, and one night he showed up at our apartment house, and insisted on taping off a little square of carpet and cleaning it as a demo.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with his product either,  but Alden was a nice, older , and very sincere man.

A few weeks later Alden called me; it was a Tuesday morning.  He asked if I wanted to clean 60,000 square feet of carpet in Cleveland that same night.  I said, Alden, I’ve never cleaned carpet in my life, not even with a grocery store rental unit, I have no equipment, and no extra employees.  All my employees had places they had to clean locally that night.  Well Alden says he has a customer in Euclid, Ohio who has to have 60,000 square feet of carpet cleaned that night, and they had called all the large carpet cleaning companies in Cleveland and they had all told this company they were crazy, it couldn’t be done, and certainly not on that short term notice.  Curious, I asked Alden some questions, like how much equipment would I need, how much chemicals, how many people, how long would it take, and so forth.  Alden said I would need a whole truckload of chemicals and equipment, which he could get from Pittsburgh that afternoon, and that I would need twenty people to work all night.  I figured my labor and materials would cost me about $7000, so I doubled that and told Alden to tell the company if they would pay me $14,000 by 10 a.m. the next day, I would have a crew of 20 people on their premises by 8 p.m. that same night.  Alden agreed to teach all 21 of us what to do with all this stuff.  I told Alden I would pay for everything the next morning after I got paid.  I got 20 people up there that night by offering them $100 in cash by 11 a.m. the next morning if they went.  Most of them had day jobs and called off sick the next day.  The company whose carpet we cleaned was Bailey Controls, and they were owned by Babcock and Wilcox, which had just been acquired by McDermott and Company.  The Chairman of McDermott had just informed Bailey Controls that he was coming to visit the next morning, and in a panic, they decided they had to have their carpet cleaned before he got there.  I figured by 10 a.m. the next morning I would own a lot more equipment and have $7000 in the bank.  I had no idea how much 60,000 square feet of carpet was.  It sounded like a lot.

Well, we went up there, did the job, and got paid.  I bet the chairman of McDermott never even noticed the carpet.  And all of a sudden life looked a little differently.  I called up the manufacturer of this carpet cleaning product and signed up for their school in Racine, Wisconsin.  I learned a lot about carpet, carpet cleaning, and marketing.  Quite by accident I had been accepted into their school for Distributors instead of Carpet Cleaning Professionals, where I belonged, and I learned all about Distributor pricing.  Rather than make a fuss about their mistake, they made me a Distributor.

Before I move on with this story, I have to tell you about a little incident that happened that night at Bailey Controls.  As about 20 or so rolled into the lobby of Bailey Controls, a guard came up to me and said, Are you with Bechtel?  And of course, since my name is John Bechtel, and the name of my tiny company was Bechtel Building Maintenance, Inc.  I thought it was certainly appropriate to respond in the affirmative.  The guard continued, Well, follow me.  And he led us to a hospitality suite reserved for the big Bechtel Engineering firm out of San Francisco.  He showed us where the liquor cabinet was, and then left us.  Only a few minutes later, he hurried back and said You’re not with Bechtel Engineering!  And I replied No, we’re with Bechtel Maintenance, and he said, Oh, you’re not allowed in here!!  And he expeditiously ushered us out of there.  Well, we really didn’t have either the time or inclination to drink before working anyway.

Now it just so happened that the landlord of my office, such as it was, was a guy named Don , and who decided to give his wife, who was a gorgeous babe, a new business to play with.  He started a residential cleaning franchising business, and put his wife in charge of it.  They sold franchises.  One day Don and I got to talking about this carpet cleaning product, which is a dry cleaning process, and I threw some coffee on his wife’s new white carpet in her office suite and then promptly removed it, to his amazement.  He said he needed to sell this stuff to his franchisees as part of their start-up package.  So I started selling the equipment and chemicals to Don, and he resold it to his franchisees, with what I thought was an astronomical mark-up.  I asked him what he was going to do when sooner or later one of them read the label on the packaging, called the manufacturer and discovered they could buy this stuff much cheaper than they were paying him.  I told him they were going to feel they had been ripped off.  Also, I listened to the pitch Don’s main operations guy gave on this stuff, and he made claims I would never have made, and I looked at Don with raised eyebrows, and Don’s reply was, “Hey, everyone has their style.”  Style, eh??  Eventually this guy’s “style” came back to bite Don.

But Don bought a lot of machines from me, and a lot of chemicals, and I ended up becoming the fourth largest distributor of these products in the country within a year.  The manufacturer  knew I was a cleaning contractor, so they sent someone down to visit me to find out what the hell I was doing with all this product.  I was buying it 38,000 pounds at a time.  I was selling it to hotel chains, and I was working on a possible deal with Wendy’s fast food franchise, who have carpet in all their retail outlets.  Don was taking the product and repacking it in his own containers, and thereby removing any labeling that would tip his franchisees off where this stuff came from and how much cheaper it could be purchased.  Apparently he and his Operations Manager had very compatible “styles”.

Meanwhile, Don’s wife, who was definitely a Show Dog, got lots of national publicity and their franchising business was booming.  So was mine.  Even Bailey Controls called me back six months later to clean their 60,000 square feet of carpet again.  For the same price.

I managed to pay for my three years internship on the Board of Directors, and my business and acumen began to grow.  Don’s franchisees figured out what was going on, and the franchising business went out of business.  Don’s wife backed up a semi tractor-trailer to the office building one day and cleaned out his offices, and maybe later she cleaned him out too.   I used to hear them yelling through the thin walls of my office.   Don and his wife got divorced.  It was hard to feel sorry for Don.  He reaped what he sowed.   I missed his wife.  I thought she  was unethical and haughty and arrogant, but she sure was nice to look at.  I took the money I had made from the carpet cleaning chemical business and put it into my janitorial business, and for the first time I had some working capital.  Before ever I took my first course in economics, I already understood at a gut level the importance of investment over consumption.  Barbara and I were still poor, but I knew things were going to change.

Looking back on several decades of organization building, I realize that my greatest disadvantage was not having had any practical experience in the “real world” before starting a business.  But to be fair to me, please remember that I had no intention of ‘going into business’; what I had done in effect was create a job for myself.  In the beginning that was all I really wanted; I desperately wanted not to starve, and since I couldn’t find a job, I created one.  My second great disadvantage was the fact that I never had a mentor, someone experienced to coach me, pointing out where the rocks were beneath the water.  So with nothing else to rely on, I turned to my old stand-by:  I would learn how to run a business from the printed page.  Without hands-on training on how to talk to people at the front lines, where the rubber hits the road, I became something of an intellectual business owner, who could spout the principles and who had mastered the lingo of the trade, but couldn’t really make himself understood to the little people who took the trash out at night.  I became what I was later to call an articulate incompetent.  I could think like a Chief of Staff, but I needed the skills of a Drill Sergeant.  So I promoted cleaners to become the drill sergeants, and I tried to teach them skills I had not mastered myself.  I was afraid of my own employees.  The only boss who needs to be afraid of his employees is the boss who is afraid of his employees.  You can never manage successfully from weakness.  If your employees sense that you are afraid they will quit, it empowers them, and it is unrealistic to think they won’t try to use that power to their advantage. 

Periodically I had no choice but to take things into my own hands, and I had to deal directly with the cleaners.  I would sit down with them and discuss what I had on my mind in the most (to me) patient, enlightened manner possible.  I would walk away from the discussion satisfied that I had achieved my goal, usually to discover that they didn’t go to work that night and had quit their jobs without notice.  Or, contrarily, I would learn later that they had been flattered and impressed that the “big boss” had come out to talk to them, but had no clue what I had said. This always came as a great shock and disappointment to me, because I had geared my vocabulary way down and had made a great effort to speak simply and directly.  Sometimes I can’t help thinking that if someone else had looked in on our operation and had known what was going on, they would have laughed, for what I really eventually did succeed in doing was getting my supervisors to imitate me.  Which meant they too could quote the lines from the company handbook, but they too couldn’t really get it done.  At one time I joked to a friend in the industry that our buildings were just as dirty as our competitors, but we were more sincere.  Obviously in time I learned but it was very difficult during the early years to overcome the conditioning of almost three decades; conditioning that told me money was the root of all sorts of ‘injurious things’, that told me to eliminate the self, or the “I” in my language.  Jehovah’s Witnesses achieved what the Communists and the Socialists of the world could only dream about.  In life with Jehovah’s Witnesses, life also revolved around “Society”, but with a capital S.  The Society with Jehovah’s Witnesses meant the theocracy, the church leadership.  In the world outside Jehovah’s Witnesses, “society” , with a lower case s, meant the greater good of the greater number.  Both were utopian concepts, and both involved the use of coercion in one form or another, but always in the guise of altruism.  Obedience in both cases was (and is) achieved through social or cultural pressure, and both cultures encouraged or required self sacrfice as the noblest virtue.  In the one, you sacrificed for God, in the other you sacrificed for whichever gang was running the show.  And in both cultures, the pursuit of material gain was considered selfish.  Of course, the reason people work hard is to advance their personal interests, with the reward of keeping their earnings as they see fit, and to improve the quality of their own life.  If they succeed to a modest extent, it is considered a virtue; if they succeed to an unusual extent, their virtue becomes their vice, and they feel obliged to hide their wealth, apologize for their wealth, or give away their wealth in conspicuous displays of charity.  There is a fundamental and philosophical contradiction between their belief systems and material success.  Like Plato long before, they even split material wealth off from spiritual wealth, and divide man into two selves at war with each other, his upper and his lower self.  For many years a sense of guilt about money and wealth served as a powerful subconscious force that routinely sabotaged my best efforts in the business world.

I came of age at the very peak of the Big Welfare State (the late seventies–the Age of Jimmy Carter), although I had no historical or political sense of what was happening in the world around me.  I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Democrat and a Republican if my life depended on it.  Struggling to survive tends to narrow your horizon somewhat.  During my time as a Jehovah’s Witness, my exposure to civic affairs was limited to a few grade school classes, and whatever Watchtower had taught me about their own organizational successes in seeking constitutional protections.  As I turned to books and periodicals to learn how to run a business, what I learned shocked me.  A lot of what I read was about how to comply with government regulations.  Government regulations???  What could there possibly be to regulate about taking out the trash?  As I attempted to build an organization, little did I know that once again, I was a mirror of my generation and the politics of my time.  My company became a microcosm of my culture, as you will see.

The most frightening magazine I subscribed to was the Harvard Business Review.   I read everything as if it had been written for me, with my tiny little cleaning operation, and I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the law was the law, regardless of size.  Being the egghead business owner, I clearly understood from HBR the concepts and always set about implementing them assiduously in my operation.  If it was an article about managing the sales function, I set about setting up a sales function to conform to the best authority in the business world.  I would design forms and systems for my sales force, which was me.  I was not being intentionally stupid, for  I knew that when we were ready for a real sales force, I would be ready.  When HBR addressed  PROBLEMS, I read the articles with the avidity of a hypochondriac turning the pages of a medical text on pathology.  Whatever the problem under discussion was, either I was convinced my organization was afflicted with it, or by God, I would see to it that it never was.  If it was an article about employee rights, I wondered if employers had any rights.  HBR often carried ads for further books one could read on any given subject, and I obsessively began to purchase and read management textbooks.  I felt like I was practically a family member of John T. Wiley and Sons, the Harvard publishing house.  The more I read, the greater my vocabulary of business expanded, and the further removed I became from the ordinary problems in my business; problems that begged for simple solutions I sometimes could not provide.  I could not bridge the gap between HBR, Mr. Wiley, and my supervisors.  And always, lurking in the background, the parental and church tapes played in my head, condemning me for seeking material success, pandering to my “lower self”.   I became an organization builder because my church-trained conscience forbid me the indulgence of enjoyment of success.  Virtually all of the profits of my business went to reinvestment rather than personal or family consumption, partly because of fear of failure, and partly because consumption produced guilt, the guilt of success and financial reward.  For me the material world and its blandishments, once I was past the survival stage, were an object of scorn and not virtue.  I was at war with myself; there was a profound contradiction between the value system I had absorbed as a true believer and success in the real world.  It was a very long time before I discovered that many millions of others shared this internal conflict.

Mssrs. Wiley published books on Employee Rights which I read, desiring to be an enlightened employer.  I was also a frightened employer.  As I devoured these, I couldn’t help but wonder, on what basis did employees acquire “special” rights, extra rights, that apparently the rest of us didn’t need?  I thought their rights were the same as my rights, i.e.  freedom to trade with whomever they wanted, for whatever reason, for as long as both parties wanted.  I was laboring under the illusion that my obligations to them were explicit; to fulfill my end of the agreed-upon terms.  Imagine my surprise to discover I had acquired unspecified, unwritten obligations, “social responsibilities” that sometimes took precedence even when the employee wasn’t living up to his end of the work-related bargain.  And I owed him because I was a beneficiary of “society that had made it possible to create and run my business.”  All I saw was other people doing the same thing I was, pursuing their own self-interest in trading with others.  I came to realize that my new undeclared responsibilities were because I was viewed as a “Lord” and my employees were the “serfs”.  Except that this was supposed to be capitalism in a free society, and it seemed to me it was getting confused with feudalism, which was anything but free, but rather existence by permission.

As Mr. Wiley provided me with more and more terrifying information about the dangers ahead, I built in more and more layers into my little organization to prepare ourselves.  We would be ready.  This (or that) would not happen to us.  I overcomplicated things, but in doing so I was postponing a day of reckoning of the contradictions between my religious  conditioning and my efforts to rise above the rat race.  I was philosophically a man at war with himself.

Back when I was at Watchtower headquarters, in the last few years before I left, and when I was clearly influenced by the thinking of Fred Maes (the Rousseau of Bethel),  I was outraged at the seeming callousness of Watchtower management and I was part of the protest movement.  After I left and ended up with a business, I rather subconsciously began to implement a management style consistent with my socialistic tendencies, a reactionary management style that would put the interests of others before my own.  My theory was that if you did this, the profits would be there, somehow.  I was wrong.  People inexplicably kept doing what they thought was  in their own best interests, and my great and noble experiment got me nothing more than negative cash flow and a lot of anxiety.

I was not learning everything from John T. Wiley, however.  I was also simultaneously learning from the book, and school, of hard knocks.  Following are some samples from both.

The most terrifying thing I learned was that not only was I responsible for anything my employees did on the job, and sometimes off the job, I was also responsible, and therefore legally liable, even if I did not know of their behavior, but in the judgement of an undisclosed someone, should have known.  I knew just enough about my employees’ lives that I knew I didn’t really want to know any more.

I was also discovering political correctness for the same time.  I learned that my Employment Applications were legally unacceptable because we asked such questions as did the applicant have a car to get to work (the job site was not served by public transportation), and we used to illegally ask our female applicants who disclosed they had small children about their anticipated baby-sitting arrangements.  I learned through the trade association that we needed to ask instead, “How did the applicant plan to get to work?” since fewer minorities owned vehicles than I presume, white anglos, and also that since we only asked the women about baby-sitting arrangements, this was discriminatory since we didn’t also ask the men.  Of course, we didn’t ask the men because in those days it was almost unheard of for a man to be the primary caretaker for small children.  I learned what things we could and couldn’t do during a union organizing drive (which I never experienced), and so on.  I was continually amazed at how incredibly complicated someone had made of the most simple things.  All I really wanted to know was if the human being sitting in front of me was willing and circumstantially able to show up for work. Whether it was legal or not to ask, we still had to find out what we needed to know to make a good hiring decision, so we refined our skills of “chatting up” the applicant, getting them to tell us what we needed to know without directly asking.  From my small corner of the world, however, our government, in the pursuit of some ideal or to placate some political constituency had long since taken leave of common sense.

The same was true when dealing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  I learned about this organization because of an old black guy who worked for me named Jim.  Jim had been with me for a couple years and for a long time did good, reliable work.  Then he fell off the wagon and his work began to slide.  I talked to him about it a couple times, and finally I gave him a written reprimand.  Jim said, ‘You know you can’t ever fire me, because I’m black and I’m old, and I’ll turn you in.’  Well, in time I did fire him, and sure enough he turned me in to the EEOC for Age Discrimination and Race Discrimination.  We supplied them with all the documentation for his termination, and I thought that would be the end of the matter.  Then they called and said they wanted to know how many black people I employed and how many people over the age of 40.  I said I had no idea; I thought it was illegal to even ask such things.  They said I had to find out and get back to them with numbers.  So we went around checking out everyone’s skin color and reading their licenses to get their age, and we sent this information in to the EEOC.  It turned out that something like 80 percent of our employees were black, and almost half of them were over the age of forty.  So we clearly weren’t discriminating, and the case was dropped.  However I told  the lady on the phone from the government agency that it was purely an accident that our percentages of blacks and over-40 were so high because we didn’t hire on that basis, and I asked her what would have happened if the numbers had fallen below the acceptable percentage, whatever that was, and she replied that I would have been in a lot of trouble.  Uh huh.

 Not everything I learned about being an employer was from the government, however.  I learned a lot from my employees.  I had always viewed my business engagements, whether with customers or employees, as simply a matter of trading with each other, whatever we had to offer.  My customers understood this also, but my employees certainly didn’t view things this way.  They seemed to think, in most cases, that I was there to take care of them.  If they didn’t keep their end of the bargain, and I told them I didn’t want to do business with them anymore, the standard response would be “ After all I did for you!”, as if there existed some unwritten I.O.U. payable to them.  After a few years, my response would sometimes be, “I think you were paid in full when my check to you cleared the bank.”  I was beginning to realize I needed to focus less on saving the world, and more on saving myself and my family.  As ridiculous as it may sound, it was a tough lesson to learn.

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.

I was turned down for a job by Truck Stops of America because I responded to an ad for someone to pump gas dressed in a three-piece suit.  I’m sure they thought I was overqualified for the job, or else crazy.  I was turned down for a management-trainee position with Arby’s, a fast food franchise that began in Youngstown, Ohio before being purchased by Pepsi.  I had no employment experience that they could understand.  I finally got a position with a company that sold burglar and fire alarms on straight commission.  I worked with them for about five weeks and quit for two reasons:  first, I had trouble getting paid commissions due, and secondly, I experienced great difficulty practicing their standard sales techniques as instructed.  We were told, for instance, to position ourselves on the sofa between the homeowner and his spouse, making sure that  each of our knees touched one of theirs.  Then we were taught when presenting the contract to drop our pen on the carpet, wait for them to politely pick it up, and suggest while they had it in their hand to go ahead and sign the agreement.  I thought it was all very hokey and distasteful.

Barbara got a job as a secretary making $600 per month.  I decided to go down the main street in town, Market St., business by business, and try to get a job as a janitor.  How hard could that be?  My first stop was at a car dealership and I met the general manager named Al Helms.  Al was one of the first, and best, things that happened to me after moving to Ohio.  Al said yes, he did need a janitor, but he didn’t want me on his payroll.  So would I please take a look around and give him a monthly price to do the work  I was to  provide all the equipment and materials.  I told Al I didn’t know how to do that, and he suggested I give it my best shot.  I walked around and told Al $400 per month.  He said that was too cheap and to go look again.  I came back a few minutes later with $600 per month.  He said that was better, that at $400 per month I would have quit after one month.  He asked me to put together a contract for him to sign, and I said I didn’t know how to do that either, so Al suggested something brief, such as  I would clean with my equipment and materials and he would pay.

Elated, I went down the street to another dealership about half as large, suggested half as much, and got that contract also.  I was now up to $900 per month!  This was real income!  Of course, I had no idea what equipment I needed, or materials, or how long any of this was going to take me to do.  But I would find a way to make it work.  I called around to janitorial supply houses, found a sales rep who prepared a list of what I needed and offered to teach me how to strip and wax floors after I bought his products.  The initial outlay was $2500.  It might as well have been a quarter of a million.  I had no money, no savings, no nest egg.  No nothing.  So obviously I would need a loan.  I had never borrowed money before, not even from a friend.  I had no credit history.  I was an unknown who had just moved in from out of state.  I was rejected by five banks; the sixth one loaned me the money.  I found a banker who believed in me.  You have to believe in yourself before you can expect someone else to believe in you.  I was scared, but I was also determined.  Over the years I have wondered if it is easier to be determined when your back is up against the wall.  Maybe it is because your choices seem so limited at the time, but  I also know that is when most people quit, or give up.  You have to keep going in order for good things to happen.

Starting Over 1978

Al Helms apparently felt sorry for me, and periodically he’d ask me how I was doing.  I had signed up for evening classes in Business Management at Younstown State University, and I was busy cleaning my two dealerships and going to class.  Al suggested I go to see Jerry Thorpe at the Automobile Dealers Association and maybe I could get Jerry to put a blurb about me in the newsletter that went out to all the dealerships in three counties.  So I went home and wrote an “infomercial” about my fledgling operation, and of course I understood that I had to make it sound as if I was a company, not a one-man operation.  I went to see Jerry, who I am sure gave me an interview only out of respect for Al.  I told Jerry that if he ever needed some filler for his newsletter, I had some newsy information about janitorial service for auto dealerships that might be useful to the membership, and I gave him my infomercial.  Well, he must have needed filler because he printed it in the next issue, and I ended up with thirteen car dealerships to clean, all over three counties.  I learned to clean very fast and drive even faster.   Except for Al Helms, my customers all thought I had an organization behind me.  So I would spend all night cleaning their buildings, go home and get a shower and put on a suit, and go back to visit them to ask them how “my people did”.  It used to really piss me off when once in a while one of my customers would accuse one of my employees of doing something I knew I had not done.  But I could not tell them it was me doing the cleaning because they wanted to do business with a company, not a cleaner.    So I would swallow my pride and tell them I would talk to my employees about the matter and get it corrected.  Driving down the road I would have a talk with myself.  Even so, it became quickly apparent that I needed to hire someone to help, and that’s when the fun really started.

I had come from a background of dedication, and this was the only paradigm I knew.  So I just assumed that when people responded to my ad in the newspaper and said they needed work, they meant it.  I had no idea how to interview applicants and what kind of questions would get them to talking about themselves and tell me what I needed to know about them.  I just told them what I had and what I was paying and the hours and asked if it suited them.  I saw them pretty much the way Al Helms saw me:  I wanted to trade with them, this amount of work for that amount of money.  I didn’t think I was doing them a favor and I didn’t think they were doing me a favor.  We were traders, no more or less.  I thought they meant what they said, otherwise why did they respond to my ad?  And if they accepted whatever we agreed to, they owed me the work and I owed them the money.  Simple, right?

My first brush with reality was with my first hire.  She was a young, slender pretty woman who seemed eager for the work.  I think I was also influenced by her attractive appearance, and when I stopped in to visit with her on the job site for the first time, I was surprised to find her dressed in a very sheer blouse and she was braless.  I liked it a lot, and so did the mechanics working in the back of the dealership.  About ten days later I stopped in at her dealership late one night, when she should still have been there, and I found the doors to the dealership showroom wide open, with neither my cleaner nor the keys anywhere to be found.  Anyone in the world could have driven off with any new car in that showroom!  Several hours later I found the keys in the grass outside one of the doors.  I could only blame myself; I had confused hormones with character and aptitude.  Over the years I also learned, over and over again, that sexual attraction is a weapon and it is used every day in the marketplace of life.  This is not bad, it just IS.  We are what we are.  Anyone who doesn’t understand this should watch the mating antics of the Bird of Paradise as filmed by the BBC.  It will make you laugh, but sometimes we have to laugh at ourselves too.  We are not all that different.  In time I learned to better understand the dynamics of human behavior without losing focus because of it.

Within several months I had begun to lose business because of the behavior of my employees.  Sometimes I was just shocked at things they would do while at work.  I was equally shocked at how they viewed me.  I had become an employer.  I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, because I didn’t feel any different than before; I just had more car dealerships to clean than I could possible keep up with myself.  I didn’t see Al Helms or any of my other customers differently because I cleaned their places of business; we had just agreed on terms of how this would get done and for what price.  I respected them and their property, and I expected to be honest with them, and I expected to be treated the same way.  But not my employees.  I would walk into buildings and find parts of brand new vacuum cleaners mysteriously missing; they ripped the cords and tore the prongs off the plugs.  When I would talk to them, as delicately as I knew how, they would shrug their shoulders and walk off, or simply tell me they knew nothing about it.  The worst part of all was correcting something they did.  I had no idea how extraordinarily difficult it is for some people to clean a desk top without smearing it.  I would show them, then I would have them show me, and if they didn’t get it right, I would show them again.  I would come back four hours later and they had smeared every desk in sight.   Sometimes if you corrected their work, they just didn’t show up the next night.  They didn’t bother to call either.  But they sure didn’t forget you when it was payday. The smallest kind gesture was often accepted, not as a gift, but as an entitlement, and went without gratitude.  I remember a few years into my business, on a Thanksgiving Day I decided it would be a nice gesture to give out turkeys to my supervisors.  I was shocked that only one out of nine supervisors bothered to say thanks, and the next year most of them asked ahead of time if I would be getting them a turkey, since they wouldn’t buy one themselves if I was going to.

I  discovered that employees lied on their time cards.  I didn’t have time clocks in my client’s places of business, and we weren’t allowed to use theirs, so my employees were on the honor system.  I told them about how long it should take them to do the job, based on my own experience.  I quickly learned that it took them a lot longer to do the same job as it did me.  But I would tell them I wanted them there on the job at say, eight o-clock, and to be finished about 10 o-clock, for two hours of work.  I would come in at eleven and not only not find them there, none of the work had been done either.  Sometimes they had just quit, and sometimes they just decided to come in at midnight that particular day.  Most of them never took a starting and ending time seriously.  Sometimes I would come in at nine, and find half the work not done, the employee was gone, and they had marked themselves out at ten.  So I was paying for time not spent on the job, I had a dirty building, and an unhappy customer.  In an attempt to resolve this problem, when I would hire them I would tell them I would pay them for two hours to do a particular job, because it couldn’t possibly take any longer than that to do the work, not even on a bad day.  .  In this way, I couldn’t go over budget, because I never paid them more than the two hours.  That of course, did not stop them from working for forty-five minutes and getting paid the full two hours.   I still had quality problems. 

Several years later I got audited by the federal Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, and I learned that paying for a fixed amount of time was against the law, and they called it “stereotyping job hours”.  I asked them how I was supposed to control the abuse and this guy just shrugged his shoulders and said that wasn’t his problem, and he gave me a bill for $17,000 that he said I owed former employees for improperly calculating their time.  Apparently he had called a sampling of them and asked them how long it really took them to do the work, and of course, smelling money, deuces were wild.  I had no documentation to disprove their claims.  And so I came to learn one of my first great business truths that they don’t tell you in business school:  in the absence of proof to the contrary, an employer is guilty until proven innocent.   I was enraged by the injustice of it all, and got a lawyer who told me there was nothing I could do about it.  He did however plead my case with the government people, and they reduced my bill to $13,000.  Very gracious of them.  In the process, I learned that the solution in dealing with the governmnet is usually to be found in semantics, not reality.  As soon as we informed our cleaners that their shift began at 6 p.m. and their shift ended at 8 p.m., and that during this shift their duties included cleaning bank A and bank B, this whole problem with the regulators went away.  It was all in the choice of language!  The trick was to get the regulators to tell you what language, what specific wording, they were looking for.  I doubt that any of these regulators had been English majors in college, and most likely would never have understood Shakespeare’s ironic  Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? implying that what a thing was had greater signficance than how it was labeled.  Not with the regulators!  I also learned that regulators are most interested in their own next performance review, and that they are often measured by how much money they bring in from employers, or how many infractions they can establish.  With tens of thousands of regulations, everyone, everywhere, is violating some aspect of the law or government regulation, knowingly or unknowingly.  Regulators’ jobs are measured by “bringing home the bacon”, i.e. finding some of those regulations you are violating, if for no other reason than to justify their own existence.  Fighting with a government regulator is usually a losing proposition, and you will only incur greater focus on your business, to your detriment.  As with so much else, I learned that when dealing with the government, it is rarely about right and wrong, or justice, or fairness; it is about conformity and obedience and following the rules, and going along in order to get along.  If you are going to fight, pick your fights carefully, unless you want to spend the rest of your life in an unwinnable tit-for-tat war of attrition.  Live your life in your own way, and stay below the radar.  That applies to anyone, not just businessmen and women.  Endless confrontation is a waste of time and of your life.  Take your lumps and move on.

Once we learned the rules, we went out of our way to follow them.  That wouldn’t prevent the authorities from attempting to shake us down once in a while.  Several years after the above episode with the Department of Labor, I got a phone call from their Cleveland office telling me they had a complaint about underpayment from a certain employee.  I said I would check our records and make sure no mistake had taken place.  We did so and got back to the authorities telling them that our records were accurate and we would be happy to send them a copy.  They replied no, the amount this lady wanted was quite small, and they wanted me just to cut a check and forward it to them, and they would pay the lady.  When I retorted that we hadn’t made a mistake or broken any laws, they said if I didn’t cooperate, they had the option of launching a full, random inspection of all my payroll records for the last three years, and such an audit would tie us up in knots for weeks or months, and wouldn’t it just be more cost effective to send the small check requested.   In other words, they wanted us to send this person unearned money just to make the regulators look good!  And we were being threatened with disruption of our business if we didn’t comply!  We stood our ground on that one, and they audited us–for one full day.  The regulator went through our payroll files for over six hours and couldn’t find a thing, and went home, discouraged.  He did not want to commit to even more time wasted with no return for his effort.  That was the last time we were bothered by these guys.

Another problem that drove me crazy was money being reported missing by my customers.  At first I would defend my employees vigorously, because I really thought they were innocent.  And sometimes they were.  Many times they were not.  I remember eventually I got a contract with a K-Mart store where my employees would be locked in all night, and the store manager would unlock in the morning and they would go home.  The store manager in this case called to tell me he thought my guys were stealing guns out of the K-Mart gun case.  So we set up  a sting operation, and he and I stayed up on the elevated  catwalk that goes all around the inside of the building, and from which we could see what was going on in the store through windows with one-way glass.  No one knew we were up there watching them.  And we did catch the thief:  it was the K-Mart Assistant Store Manager.  It was in this way that I learned all the thieves and miscreants were not exclusively on my payroll.  Many years later I hired a young man who, unknown to me, used to be a drug dealer (they generally don’t include this on their resume or application).  He was a good employee and eventually was promoted to supervisor.  Years after he had established a good reputation for himself within our operation, he felt safe enough to confide in me details about his past.  Two things I remember vividly were that he and his cronies never worried about law enforcement for a significant number of local officers got their personal stash of controlled substances from him.  Another item of interest was that he and his friends preferred to get jobs with guard service companies who serviced local retail stores.  Talk about hiring the fox to watch the henhouse!!!!  Sometimes you need to hire and use people who understand the problems from the inside.  That’s why criminals are often hired to catch criminals, and computer hackers are hired to catch hackers.

One of my earliest “lucky breaks” was to get a contract with a local bank that had about 20 branch offices in the immediate area of Youngstown.  I soon had about 30 people employed in these bank buildings, including the main office which was over 10 stories tall.  I was often out late at night checking on the work of my employees, and office buildings were deathly silent in the midde of the night when I would come through.  Being a reader, I never failed to notice what books lined the shelves of executives, and I was eternally curious to learn something new that would help advance my practical education.  In this particular case, I noticed a copy of “In Search of Excellence” prominently displayed on the credenza of the president and ceo of this bank.  I had already read the book, but I picked it up anyway and immediately noticed that it had never been opened before, for it made that ‘new book’ cracking noise when I opened it.  I had to smile thinking that this president had bought this book as an ornament, not to read.  Well, unfortunately, our company had apparently hired a thief and placed him in this facility, and this person was stealing blank checks from one of the tenants upstairs, filling them out and cashing them in local grocery stores.  The police were trying to figure out who it was, and of course I was taking a lot of heat from my client to catch the thief also.  As it turned out, the client caught the thief before I did.  A Vice President of the bank hid in the building after hours (with his own personal gun) and actually caught the thief redhanded.  The next day the  president and ceo of this bank decided that my entire company had to be fired, and gave us half a days notice to clean out all of our employees and equipment at all locations, and the same Vice President of the bank who caught the thief rode shotgun on our truck from location to location making sure we didn’t steal anything else on the way out!  Of course I had a contract, but the bank had all the money, not to mention the fact that they were being bought out by another one of my clients, another bank, and suing them would not particularly endear me to what was to become the parent company.  You can imagine then, my enjoyment of the irony when, nine months later this same president and ceo was indicted by the FBI for embezzling $7 million dollars from his bank.  A few days after this news broke, the parent company asked me to come back and resume cleaning those facilities.  I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this guy should have read the book on his credenza!  Years later when I occasionally did consulting for some companies, it was not uncommon to find that the biggest problem in the client organization was the person who hired me.

On  other occasions I got the bad news about theft long after my employees quit or were fired.  When we cleaned the floors in a K-Mart or grocery store, we used these large walk-behind machines that put soapy water down on the floor, scrubbed the floor, vacuumed up the water, and squeegeed the floor dry, all in one pass.  The machines were quite expensive, about $6,000 apiece.  They had two tanks inside them, one a solution tank, and the other a recovery tank.  When cleaning grocery stores I found out my employees stole wrapped steaks, kept them submerged inside the solution tanks of the autoscrubbers until they got outside the store, when they would remove them and take them home.  I could never understand what they thought was wrong with just paying for them.  One of the problems in the janitor business is that whenever something disappears, in the minds of the client, the shadow of suspicion falls first on the cleaning people.  This is often very unfair, but if your mother told you life is fair, she lied to you.  Every business everywhere has to spend serious money to minimize what is tactfully referred to as “inventory shrinkage.”  They’re not talking about what happens on laundry day.  Stealing is a part of life, and always has been. 

In Ohio, Unemployment Insurance is a government monopoly.  An employer paid in so many cents on the payroll dollar, and if someone lost their job through no fault of their own, such as a business downsizing, they could collect a percentage of their paycheck for about six months or so as a financial cushion until they found another job.  I did not realize that on the street this was viewed as an entitlement, something that was owed them without regard for any efforts they may or may not make to find another job.  If someone lost their job for “just cause” they could not collect unemployment, and it would not be charged against the company’s rating set by the government.  I was quite astonished to discover that many of these people would lie through their teeth about almost anything in order to collect their unemployment.  I would contest their stories, and time after time I would lose.  Once again I discovered that in the eyes of the law, or at the very least in the eyes of the government referee adjudicating the case, in the absence of documentation to the contrary, I as the employer was wrong.  I could not help but wonder why or how the referee hearing the case could not identify the obvious contradictions in their stories and not hear the sincerity and frustration in my own.  Little by little I got better at building documentation, only to discover I was still losing consistently because I had not used precisely the right terminology or phrase to describe my employees’ actions.  As we continued to lose these cases, our unemployment experience rate, the formula by which the government decides how much to assess a company in unemployment taxes, rose considerably.  This made us more expensive for our customers.

It was many years later, when we were much bigger and could afford an outside consulting firm who handled all this unemployment stuff  for us, that I learned from them what the magic phrases and catch words were which had to be used to win a case.  For example, let’s say  you have an employee who is quite unproductive and will have to be discharged as soon as you find an acceptable replacement.  While you are looking for this replacement, he causes a major complaint from your customer, and the next day says he’s quitting at the end of the month.  If, in your frustration, you tell him he can leave right away, he will collect unemployment.  His “Quit” became a “Constructive Discharge” the moment you shortened his resignation lead time.  As a “Quit” he would not have collected (but you might have lost your customer due to his negligence), but as a “Constructive Discharge” he was unemployed through no fault of his own.  The legal concept behind the term “Constructive Discharge” was that some employers would try to create a difficult working environment for an employee in an effort to force them to quit, knowing that when the employee did so, the burden of proof for the cause of the unemployment shifted to the employee.  And of course this is what employers with any sense did, for we all knew how difficult it was to prove to a referee’s satisfaction that a discharge was justifiable.  So many of these job applicants learned the system quite well, and worked just long enough to leave and collect unemployment benefits.  And the attitude of the referees was that these poor people had no job, and someone should take care of them.  Like the people who were working, for instance.  I also think the government referees were well educated and poorly paid themselves, and there was a certain amount of undisguised envy and distrust of employers.  They seemed to have a zero-sum, feudal mentality, that if we had money, we must be taking it from these poor people.  Philosophically the referees simply saw it as a transfer of wealth, and they wanted the employee to be able to collect.  Again, it wasn’t about right or wrong, or justice and fairness, but about entitlement and ‘social equality’.  Producers were punished for their virtues, and the indolent were rewarded for their vices.  This prevailing attitude in the culture in northeast Ohio had a lot to do with their inability to make a financial recovery over a period of 40 years.

Another, similarly intractable problem with similar causes was the matter of Workers’ Compensation.  In the state of Ohio, workers’ compensation is a state monopoly.  It is basically an insurance policy for workplace injuries, so that if an employee is injured on the job, the policy will pay for their time off work  and pay their medical expenses.  Because there was no legal competition, the Workers’ Compensation rates were usurious, back-breaking for business.  The system was rife with corruption, graft, and abuse.  Employees flagrantly abused the system, faked injuries in order to collect insurance money while sitting at home, and it was virtually impossible to prove to the authorities that they were committing fraud.  The public in general didn’t realize that the money the government used to pay for these claims came directly from employers, which of course raised the cost of operating a business.  Workers’ Compensation was by far the single largest, uncontrollable business expense, bar none.  I doubt there was an employer in Ohio that didn’t have their own horror stories about employees who claimed they couldn’t work because they had injured their back at work, but who belonged to bowling leagues, played summer softball, and had part-time jobs in construction, getting paid under the table.  And the injuries were always the same:  they claimed they had hurt their back.  “Back problems” were indefinable and indisputable.  No one could really prove you did, or didn’t,  have a back problem.

What made all this dishonesty possible, of course, was the existence of two cottage industries that benefitted by the abuse:  chiropractors and Workers’ Compensation attorneys.  The chiropractors would prescribe virtually endless treatments that rarely produced any significant progress (for then the treatments, and the income from them would cease).  The attorneys got paid on a percentage of the benefit amount you were awarded by the state, so it was very much to their advantage for your treatments, and their income stream, to continue.  I had a neighbor who had been collecting Workers’ Comp payments for many years, and he would tell me how his attorney would rehearse him for a Benefits Hearing, including advice not to shave for a week before the hearing, to wear shabby, rumpled clothing, and to otherwise look down and out.

When we knew a claim was fraudulent, we always reported it, and I can honestly say I don’t know of one single occasion where it was even investigated by the state.  When the state would send us information in the mail about safety in the workplace, and safety training programs, I used to actually get mad.  My problem was not a lack of safety awareness; my problems were fraud, greed, and government lassitude.  Everybody seemed satisfied with the status quo.  Labor unions could crow about how they were protecting the rights of employees, politicians could advertise about how they were the champions of the little guy against those rapacious employers, the chiropractors and attorneys were getting rich from the business, and the employers, well, they would simply pass the costs on to their customers, and the state Workers Compensation fund was awash in cash from high premiums.   So what’s the problem???  And all of this was passed off to the media and the public as altruism; the government authorities looking out for the best interests of the common man.  It never occurred to anyone, apparently, that the government had no money of its own, and merely transferred income from those who earned it to those who preferred not to.  And that the purveyors and facilitators of the system were getting rich from being the middlemen in the deal.

The problem was that Ohio businesses, burdened with this high cost, could not compete with other businesses outside of Ohio who operated under more enlightened and competitive systems.  So business was leaving the state, and new businesses didn’t want to invest in Ohio.  And when the State of Ohio tried to reform the Workers’ Compensation system, they were subjected to a powerful media blitz paid for by the cottage industries that fluorished under the status quo.  For our part, our little company literally staggered under the burden of making the premium payments, and for many years we were under a partial payment plan with the state. 

Eventually the balance of power shifted slightly (and temporarily) from the cottage industries who lobbied to preserve the system, over to employers, for in time people began to realize that if business left the state, there would be no funding for the system.  I always thought of the political process in matters of business and economics as resembling fleas on a dog.  The dog is Business and the fleas are the parasites that live off the dog, and the political process was a system of constantly determining the maximum number of fleas you can load on to the dog without killing it.  In Ohio, the Workers Compensation fleas were killing the dog.  In order to survive Business was leaving the state.  Suddenly, one year, I got a check in the mail from the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, in the amount of $36,000.00 because the ‘Bureau’s investments had been unexpectedly successful.’  My ass.  When you punish your productive people for their productiveness, those with get-up-and-go get up and go.  The State of Ohio had to stop the flight of business and capital out of the state.

I have to say in passing, that the real victims of the WC system were actually the fraudulent claimants.  They usually got caught up in  a spiral of altering their life style to conform to the needs of the fraud they were committing.  They had to be convincing, and I think that for many of them the pretense eventually became reality.  Their back did hurt,  and when they dressed and acted in a manner required to maintain their benefits, their self-image began to conform to what they saw in the mirror. In my experience, they were almost always a very unhappy, depressed lot.  It took far more energy to maintain their benefits than it would have to exercise daily and find a job they could handle, for honest money.  Fraud corrupts the soul every bit as much in the little guy as it does in the fat cat attorney down the street who advises him.  Some of these chiropractors and attorneys made half a million dollars a year working the system. 

Many years ago I had a skinny fellow who worked for me for a few months named Rodney.  Rodney worked hard when he felt like it, and one day he helped me unload some stuff off the back of a van and into a shed in my driveway.  It took us about an hour.  A couple weeks later Rodney quit and I got a Workers Compensation claim in the mail.  Rodney stated he had hurt his back helping me unload the van.  I thought ‘that’s funny, he never said anything, and he seemed fine to me.  What injury??’  Well, Rodney got himself an attorney and got his claim.  He has been collecting Workers Compensation benefits for many years now.  Every year we get literally dozens of pieces of mail from the state Bureau of Workers Compensation with regard to Rodney, and it is an endless litany of hearings, medical evaluations, and negotiations.  It appears the state is trying to get rid of Rodney’s case, and of Rodney, and with great difficulty.  Rodney, all by himself, must keep two or three state employees busy full-time just circulating all this paperwork.  And Rodney, well this must be what he does full-time for a career these days, responding to all this stuff.  I cannot imagine how he can have much time for anything else.  As far as his back goes, I have no idea what’s wrong with his back, if anything.  But there is one thing I do know:  he didn’t hurt it at work with me that day.

What bugged me the most about the Workers Compensation boondoggle in Ohio was that with the exception of employers, everybody was presenting themselves to the public in  altruistic terms; what they were doing to help everybody else.  Everybody, the unions, the attorneys, the chiropractors, the politicians, and the state bureaucracy, were selling themselves as the guardians of public interest and the injured worker, while they were fleecing the system and lining their pockets.  And as always, we employers were the bad guy because we made no bones about the fact that we were there to make money.  For ourselves, and our investors.  For this reason, we were selfish and greedy, and the worker needed to be protected from us.  The lesson appeared to be that all anyone had to do to be believed was to merely proclaim his unselfish, altruistic intentions, and anyone who stated the opposite, that he was looking out for his own best interest, could not and should not be trusted.  Now you tell me, which one would you believe?  Like I said, whenever anyone tells you what he’s going to do for you,  grab your wallet and run like hell.

I was also becoming acquainted with the halo benefit of government:  All government gets a huge benefit of assumed legitimacy.  Maybe that’s why we have 80,000 pages of government regulation in the Federal Register.  For me, the administration of Workers’ Compensation insurance in Ohio during those years was an example of the Lockean Paradox:  The very instrument used to secure one’s rights becomes their greatest threat.  In the face of this vast smothering bureaucracy, does anyone really believe they are in control of their economic life because they vote every four years??

Because the government regulated so many aspects of the employment relationship, I learned over and over again that everything in business related to employees had to be documented.  It was necessary to adhere closely to a system of written progressive disciplinary procedures for employees; the catch for an employer was that from the moment you administered any kind of written warning to the employee, whatever little there might have been of a positive attitude in the employee instantly evaporated.  No matter what you said to the contrary, in their minds from that point on you were trying to get rid of them.  And of course that very often became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

What a far cry all this was from my former utopian world of Watchtower and Bethel.  Was everything really this messy?  Where had all the heros gone?

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.

Interestingly, many years later when I took some college courses in Aristotelian logic, I learned that Jehovah’s Witnesses routinely but expertly practiced all of the fallacies of both evidence and reasoning.  Let’s say they wanted to publish a series of articles on Belief designed to motivate their readership to question their own belief systems and predispose them to look at Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs favorably.  The writers would not begin by attacking the readers’ beliefs.  Quite to the contrary, they would establish a reasonable tone testifying to your right to believe what you want, and remarking at the incredible diversity of beliefs that this results in.  Then they point out the inevitable contradictions in all these beliefs; how can a truth seeker distinguish between belief and truth?  They will then supply some historical anecdotes showing the harm that mistaken beliefs have caused.  They will then discuss why people believe, such as the influences of your family, education, and media.  In each case, they will point out reasonably how each of these can serve a valuable purpose (for do not Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves teach their children to stay in the religion?) They will point out the disadvantages of uncritical acceptance of what others taught you, and of the powerful forces manipulating the media.  Obviously then, guidance from someone higher than man is needed, and this can be found in the Bible.  As proof thereof, numerous texts from the Bible are supplied.  However, the Bible itself warns against many false prophets that would arise, and therefore it is critical that you check whatever you are being told against the Bible.  And luckily for you, Jehovah’s Witnesses can help you do just that!  And then it will be your decision what you choose to believe.  Of course a truly wise person will believe what God’s Word tells them.  They can simplify this process for you.

In the above example, they set up the Straw Argument to discredit all the traditional secular sources of belief, and then move to the Bible as the only possible truthful source, then with very hasty generalizations discredit all sources of religious belief on the basis of the existence of contradictions.  They might even invoke arguments about all the errors in Aristotle’s philosophy to discredit his writings on logic!  They use the Bible as the only reliable Source of evidence in this context, for it is the value of the Bible as a standard that they are defending. Notice that by discrediting all other sources, both secular and religious,  through the flimsiest of argumentation they attempt to establish themselves as the only available source of reliable truth by default.

Now let’s take another example, this time directed at the members of the congregation, with the purpose of admonishing them against straying too far from the party line.  This argumentation will begin with the valid assumption that their reader has already accepted the Bible as the only valid source of truth.  Again, they might begin with examples of mistakes in the writings of historical figures, especially prominent philosophers of the past.  Then they would quote the Bible verse that admonishes:  “Look out:  perhaps there may be someone who wil carry you off as his prey through the philosophy and empty deception of men . . .”  They might then segue to another Bible verse that says “Woe to those wise in their own eyes . . .”  Can you see where this is going?  Then from there to a Biblical proverb:  “He that is trusting in his own heart is stupid. . . “  Now, let’s see, since we obviously can’t rely on the wisdom of secular sources, and since we can’t rely on ourselves, who should we rely on?  Well, we need to exercise thinking ability.  Sounds good, right?  Hmnnn.  Then we proceed to another Bible verse that emphasizes attaining “oneness in the faith.”  Aha!  Only by “oneness” can we avoid the terrible pitfalls of false ideas and teachings (such as, anything promulgated in contradiction to what the faithful are reading in this article, for example.)  The faithful are then exhorted that to be in “oneness” they must be in full harmony with their fellow believers, and would not advocate personal opinions or harbor private ideas when it comes to spiritual matters.  And of course, once again, the readership is reminded that God works through “the faithful and discreet slave”, their euphemism for the church leadership.  The final exhortation will be to exercise thinking ability by continuing to study church publications and attend all the church meetings, thereby protecting the membership from outside contagion.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are masters of circular logic, and the above examples show how seamlessly they segue from the dangers of your unquestioning acceptance of your current beliefs to advocating your unquestioning acceptance of their beliefs!  And notice in their concluding arguments  how skillfully they equate  thinking ability with conformity, two antithetical concepts if ever there were any!  If these articles had the purpose of defending the church’s own change in position on a particular matter, they would invoke a Bible text about “the light getting brighter and brighter as the day draws near.”  If you read their publications critically, there isn’t a fallacy of language, evidence, logic and reasoning that they don’t commit.

By the way, the examples I offer above are real, drawn from an August 1, 2001 issue of The Watchtower entitled “Is There a Sound Basis for Your Beliefs?”  No wonder my abstract for an article on being a thinking Christian was so heavily amended!

Once you give yourself permission to question the unquestionable, you have opened a Pandora’s box that can never be closed again.  Once I got past the dogma, doctrine, and dictates of an authoritarian and autocratic society, the questions came in a steady stream.  Once you open your eyes to reality, it is amazing to find what was always there.  Belief motivates even as it blinds.  As I gave more and more thought to what I had been taught, the questions and conflicts grew, and severe headaches became an almost daily occurrence on my job.

What I found most remarkable as Jehovah’s Witnesses and mainstream religion, politics, media, and culture traded shots across each other’s bows was that they were all, and accurately, accusing each other of the same thing:  excess, lies, misrepresentation, and hatefulness in the name of ideologically driven “truth”!  It is a daily occurrence that I read something somewhere that is a clear misrepresentation of facts in support of a belief, as the religious Right attacks the liberal Left and vice versa.  I even find parallels in eschatology, as an author of The Coming Ice Age within a generation becomes a rabid proponent of Global Warming.  And yet people marvel that Jehovah’s Witnesses can selectively forget yesteryear’s predictions of Armageddon and apocalypse!  The beat goes on.  Cults are a pejorative term we apply to vigorous groups who operate outside the realm of the politically correct, but who engage in identical behaviors as the mainstream.  In this regard, Socialism is Liberalism in a hurry, and Communism is Socialism in an even bigger hurry.  The Left would control you in the  name of Society, and the Right would enslave you to please God.  Ultimately they are all Utopians with very different versions of the Ultimate Good.  Each of them champions of certainty and final truth, they all believe the end justifies the means, and the “means” is always some form of coercion, including guns or whatever else is available to them.

In December of 1975 a group of fifty prominent elders from around the country were called in to Brooklyn for a high level conference to be overseen by the Governing Body itself.  I was invited to attend.  Seated next to me was my mentor Malcolm Allen, who was moderating this portion of the discussion and next to him, was a member of the Governing Body, Ted Jaracz.  When one of the elders who mistakenly believed the offered mantra of open honest discourse asked why the Watchtower Society kept printing obscure, difficult- to-understand textbooks that bored the faithful, the Governing Body member next to Malcolm kicked him under the table to induce him to change the subject.  The obscure books in question were invariably authored by Fred W. Franz, the theological ayatollah of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he was beyond criticism.  Fred was fond of insisting that the most miniscule details of Old Testament lore were types, or prefigurements, of events in our time, which he called the antitypes.  So a typical question for discussion in one of his works would be, Who is the antitypical Habbakuk (a minor Hebrew prophet and the name of a small book in the Old Testament), and why?  We used to irreverently joke around and add, ‘And who cares?’   It was to be many, many years before I read other authors such as Robert Bly and Camille Paglia and discovered that Jehovah’s Witnesses were not the only ones with a fascination for types and archetypes.

As anticipated, there were casualties.  I was one of them.  Even though the rebels won, revolutions have unintended consequences.  The Governing Body was enlarged from seven members to eleven, and finally to eighteen.  Ray Franz, who was clearly the Che Guevara of the theological revolution, was ousted, as was Ed Dunlap.  There was a merging of sorts of the old and the new.  Brother Knorr, the third president in the organization’s history, lost status, got sick and died.  To me, Dan Sydlik looked less like Georges Danton (who eventually was guillotined for his moderation and opposition to the excesses of the Reign of Terror)  and more like Joseph Fouche who survived four different regimes about the time of the French Revolution, and who conspired against each of them, was a survivor who co-opted to each new regime and rose to condemn his previous co-conspirators.  Fred Franz died of old age, I believe at the age of 101. 

Before everything really hit the fan, I decided to leave.  It was ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’  I told the organization that my wife and I wanted to start a family.  They had difficulty accepting this since she was not pregnant.  They could not grasp why we would choose to leave except for an accidental pregnancy.   It was part of the unverbalized creed that one would never evince any dissatisfaction with life at Bethel, but offer various family responsibilities as the pretext for leaving.  Aging parents in need of care, accidental pregnancy, family emergencies were all acceptable.  It would have been unthinkable to tell the truth and say ‘I’m unhappy here and want to do something different with my life.’  Fred Maes had tried it and was excoriated for his honesty.  So our explanation that we were leaving to plan a family was something of a rejection of the herd.  It implied that life offered us choices we considered superior to our existence there at headquarters.

My wife Barbara was quite unhappy with my decision.  Barbara loved the regimented and secure life at headquarters, and to the best of my knowledge she suffered none of the doubts and qualms of conscience that plagued me.  I don’t think she ever really forgave me for giving up our life there; as far as she was concerned, she intended to spend the rest of her life there.  One of the reasons she decided to marry me was because I appeared to be the quintessential Watchtower man–bright, dedicated, focused, serious, and with lots of potential for upward mobility within the church.

For my part I still don’t know why I married Barbara.  She was smart, attractive, and a committed, conscientious member of the flock, and everyone approved of our match.  Sometimes it almost seemed like an arranged marriage.  Testosterone still hadn’t kicked in, and I was not particularly hormone driven.  Masturbation was a rare experience for me.  I was simply too busy to bother.  Barbara and I started to date, but most of our time together was with church activities, and after a while it seemed as if the next, expected step was to propose marriage, so I did.  I knew that most of the old men at headquarters who had never married were sort of peculiar and I didn’t want to end up like them, so I guessed that meant I should marry someone, and here was Barbara, and there was no particular reason not to pick her, so I did.  Or rather, she picked me. 

Emotionally I was not ready for this, even though I was a textbook romantic and played out my role with seeming enthusiasm.  My body vented the stress through acute bronchitis just prior to our wedding, and I was released from the Bethel Infirmary only hours before our wedding.  I was very sick during the wedding activities, and while enroute to our honeymoon cabin in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, I had to pull to the side of the road and sleep a few hours.  I was a long, long way from knowing myself and being able to articulate the emotional conflicts that I was busy repressing.

When I first met Barbara’s parents, Bill and Jinny Newman, I was impressed with the homespun intelligence and honesty of her father.  He was however a man of deep internal conflicts.  Bill was a very strong man except when it came to Jinny.  He was very tall (6’6”) and very self-confident, to the point of being intimidating.  Few people would pick a fight with Bill.  But Bill wasn’t a true believer.  As a concession to Jinny, Bill would attend all the congregational meetings, but he would not participate in the discussions.  He also would not engage in door-to-door witnessing.  This labeled him as a fringe Witness.  Jinny did not cope well with her husband’s inadequacies and  made her displeasure and scorn felt in many ways, not the least of which was that she taught her three daughters a fundamental disrespect for their father.  Bill just assumed that there had to be something wrong with him that he could not believe as his wife did and he felt self-condemned.  He therefore endured his wife’s displeasure without complaint.  When I first observed my fiancée interact with her immediate family, their disdain for their father became immediately apparent.  Jinny on the other hand was generally regarded in the congregation as a model of faith and rectitude.  Because I admired Bill and because of my prominence in the church, Bill’s stock rose within his family circle for a time.  Thus began a Golden Age of family life within the cult that was to disintegrate when I betrayed the bonds that held us together by choosing to walk away from life at headquarters and eventually the church itself.

It was the best of times in that Barbara and I left Bethel before the final shake-out and before I too came under the intense scrutiny that others suffered.  It was the worst of times because I was about to find out how poorly prepared I was for survival outside my safe cocoon of the last nine years.

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.

John often astonished me with his phlegmatic honesty.  One day when I approached him from behind his chair, I asked him what he was doing, and he gratuitously and unexpectedly replied ‘I’m just sitting here picking my nose.’  That was more information than I thought I needed to know, but John probably thought he was busted anyway and might as well come clean right away.  About half a year after he married, he came in one day and laconically said, ‘You know John, marriage is like taking a bath–once you get in it’s not so hot.’  I admired John Adams, and I liked him almost as much as I did Fred Maes.  It saddened me that they did not like each other.  They both seemed to sense at a very deep level that they stood for different things.  John was a corporate man and an excellent manager.  He admired and utilized the competence of people around him.  He was a realist, self-assured, and ambitious.  Fred was not particularly competent in a business sense, and should have been a shrink.  He loved more than anything else talking to people and getting inside their heads.  He was a displaced soul, and really didn’t fit well into the quasi-military life style of Watchtower headquarters.  The boys loved him.  Fred was very non-judgmental and laughed at their sins.  He had a special gift for making them feel whole and good about themselves, and had no qualms about suggesting they should quit headquarters and go home if they needed to.  The rift between John Adams and Fred Maes grew until finally the counseling sessions in the office were abolished by decree and Fred Maes was banished to a machine post upstairs.  To Fred, this was clearly punishment from the authoritarian establishment, and his machine assignment was his own personal gulag.  Since I had the free run of the factory, Fred and I now began daily clandestine meetings behind paper rolls on storage floors to discuss the ever-unfolding events of the theological revolution in progress.  To make matters worse, John Adams now decided to make me his confidante, and started telling me everything that was wrong with Fred and his crowd.  I was a ‘closet  socialist’ and conservative management was confiding in me!

There was another dissident  named Dan Sydlik who had been named to the Governing Body but whom the corporate Old Guard had relegated to a demeaning position in the factory.  Dan Sydlik was in his late forties, and had this deep, barrel-chested booming voice and an imposing presence in spite of his demotion no doubt intended to discipline and caution him for some infraction, or perhaps for stepping on the wrong person’s (read  Brother Knorr’s) toes. Perhaps because of his voice, I often thought of him as the Georges Danton of French Revolution fame.   I began dividing my time between visits in hiding with Fred Maes and visits with Dan Sydlik.  I would listen enraptured as they regaled me and privileged others with moral, ethical, and theological differences with the church’s established positions on various matters.  At the very beginning it was astonishing to hear anyone with the chutzpah to dispute any published church position.  In time however, it brought down the walls in my own mind, and I began to question and challenge on my own.  Not that I was any particular scholar, but sort of like a cat that has been house-bound all it’s life, and has a glimpse of life outside the front door for the first time and tries to go for it.

Looking back on it, this was a most intoxicating time of my life.  I was a not-so-distant observer of a church in crisis at the top.  There was a great ideological rift, and it was clear the battle would be bloody.  The rank-and-file Bethelite was not really clued in to what the leadership was ranting about at morning devotions, and for the most part slept through it or assumed it was too deep for their comprehension.  Not nearly as interesting as, say, a sexual purge.  Sure that he was about to cause some mayhem for my friend Fred Maes, I began keeping secret notes of John Adams’ conversations with me, documenting (in French) his tirades,  lest they be discovered by someone and compromise me.  Apparently alleged abuses of personnel in the factory had become an issue in the Governing Body, and a committee was formed to investigate.  I was called as a witness, and I brought out my notes which were damning enough and I believe caused considerable embarrassment for my boss, John Adams.  I had become not only a socialist activist, but also a whistle blower.  I was promoted out of manufacturing to the Service Department.

The Service Department did not establish policy, but it was the highest level body for implementing and interpreting policy as laid down by the Governing Body.  If you were to compare the Governing Body to the Catholic pope, you might say the Service Department was the College of Cardinals.  Circuit and District Overseers (Bishops and Archbishops) as well as Branch Overseers (who ran the organization in foreign countries) were trained by Service Department staff.  I was assigned there as an entry-level male secretary, and I learned to type dictation.  John Adams and Fred Maes receded into the background.   In time they both left Bethel and went very separate paths.

My mentor in the Service Department was a dynamic man named Malcolm Allen.  Malcolm had a wonderful vocabulary and was very dynamic and self-assured, someone who knew his way around the system.  Except the system was changing.

I had met Malcolm Allen years before when I first came to Bethel.  All new members of the “Bethel Family” were sent to the Brooklyn Heights Congregation, where they were evaluated during their first six months.  The Brooklyn Heights Congregation was supposed to be a world-class showcase for all congregational activities.  Their meetings were Broadway productions, their public speakers were supremely polished, and everything you did was closely scrutinized.  I, of course, welcomed all this.  I was a company man.  There were about 250 members of this congregation, of whom only a handful was locals — non-Bethelites.  One of these, a poor soul named Rose Tisch, was an elderly lady who lived by herself in the nearby St. George Hotel, a seedy, dilapidated place.   Rose contracted shingles, a nasty, painful affliction from the herpes family of viruses that causes you to itch around your midsection.  Rose was in such pain she could not go to the store to buy food and other necessaries.    I had befriended Rose, and I felt sorry for her, so every day for many weeks I took food from the Bethel dining room in Tupperware containers to her in her hotel room to eat.  Well, somehow Malcolm, who was the Congregation Servant (pastor), got wind of this and met with me.  He said “If Brother Knorr finds out about this, you will be excoriated.”  I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up and found out I would be “verbally skinned alive”.  I quit taking food to Rose.  I don’t know what happened to her.  I was a company man.

Now, seven  years later, Malcolm Allen was to be my boss in the Service Department.  The theological ferment was felt even more acutely here than in the factory, since so much of the departmental work depended on policy direction from the Governing Body.  And there were lots of conflicting signals, depending on who you were listening to.  There was a case referred in by the elders of an East Coast congregation:  A man in their congregation married, changed his mind, and got his marriage annulled a few days thereafter.  A couple years later he met someone else, married, and had five kids.  Most of these kids were now in their mid to late teens, and the couple decided to adopt a sixth child.  When they filed the adoption papers, the state discovered that the husband’s annulment from 25 years before had never been properly ratified by the state, and he was technically and officially still married to his prior wife.  In other words he was an unwitting bigamist.  The church decided he was living in sin with his current wife of 25 years, and ruled he had to separate from her and could not have sex with her until the State in which he lived officially sanctioned his annulment of some 25 years before.  It took the government bureaucracy some months to accomplish this, and the separation from his wife and family created considerable hardship and embarrassment for all concerned.  For the church it was clearly the State’s sanction that validated the marriage and not the intentions and practice of the couple for several decades.  This case was referred to the Governing Body and there was considerable debate about what to do.  I doubted whether some of them had any idea what an impact their decisions had on the lives of real people.

The constant controversy was unnerving, and it took its toll on everyone.  Malcolm became sick with a mysterious illness that ultimately confined him to his dorm.  I visited him there regularly, taking his interoffice mail to him, and I knew he was concerned about not getting his work done.  I offered him my services, suggesting that I could dictate answers to his official mail, get it typed by others, and then bring it to him for approval before mailing.  No one else needed to know about it.  There was method to my madness.  I hated being a secretary, and I hated typing, and I wanted to do what Malcolm did.  I wanted to dictate the letters, not type them.  Perhaps in desperation, Malcolm agreed to try it.

We used the old Norelco dictating machines, and senior staff would give us secretaries completed tapes with big bulging file folders containing all the background information on each case under consideration.  We secretaries had these little upright plastic files that would hold up to five dictation tapes waiting to be transcribed.  When Malcolm and I made our deal, I stayed at my secretarial desk.  It would have been a dead giveaway to sit at Malcolm’s desk–a great presumption.  So I did the dictation at my desk, with my typewriter in front of me.  I would put five empty dictation tapes in the file slots to make it look like I had a full slate of dictation tapes waiting to be transcribed, and then I would put the real tapes that I had dictated on top of these, making it look like I was hopelessly behind in my work.  Harley Miller, the  department overseer would come by, notice my ‘dilemma’, and remove the excess tapes on top and distribute them to other secretaries in the department, who then dutifully transcribed my dictation.  They never questioned the fact that they were listening to my voice, and not Malcolm’s, a silent testimony to the law of unintended consequences.  Taught not to question authority, they didn’t.  It was, after all, the department head who distributed my tapes to them.

This deception continued for some months while Malcolm struggled with his illness.  Upon his return to work, he apparently suffered some qualms of conscience and ‘fessed up to what he and I had done.  There was some small commotion and someone from the Governing Body came down and collected a bunch of the stuff I had written and reviewed it.  They decided I was pretty good at it, and gave me approval to continue under Malcolm’s supervision.  In this manner at the ripe old age of 25 I was authorized to direct the faithful from a very high position.  Needless to say my peers were much older and most had less hair.  Probably close to half the letters we answered were sexually related.  Over time we became so inured to the content of our work day, it lost it’s shock value.  I remember one day noticing my own male secretary with his head down on his typewriter.  When I asked him what was the matter, he blushed and confessed he was typing my answer to a congregation that had written about what to do with a member who had had sex with a goat.  All in a day’s work.

When we answered correspondence from the congregations, no one signed these letters.  Instead, they were rubber stamped with “Watchtower Bible and Tract Society”.  The letters were still traceable to both their author and the secretary who typed them because everyone in the department had a three-letter code, which was typed at the top of every letter sent out.  I would marvel sometimes at how whatever was said above that stamp was treated as the divine word, and had power over people’s lives.  Sometimes I used to wonder what anyone out there in the congregations would think if they knew that some snot-nosed young kid was the author of  the divine will for them.

Before I had gone to Bethel, I had been curious about how the church leaders got their revelations from God.  Did they commune with him in a closet somewhere?  Did God speak to them in dreams?  Did they ever talk about it?  Did he talk to only one or two of them, or many?  Without ever having heard the word, I had become fascinated by epistemology, the science of how we know what we know.  From my vantage point in the Service Department, I was now in a position to get some real answers.  I was disappointed.  What I saw was not divine, but very human.  I saw old men arguing with each other.  I saw power struggles, deception, anger, turf protecting, and fear.  I saw sincerity and chicanery.  I saw voting and poor losers.  I saw graciousness and greed.  What I never saw, however, was some evil mastermind at the center of the web.  This organization had long before taken on a life of its own, and perhaps the worst I ever saw was victims of other victims.  I began to wonder where I fit into all of this.  What was I?

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.

About a year or so after I graduated from Bethel Entrant’s School, I was in due course assigned to a French speaking group of Haitians in Newark, New Jersey.  It was my job to develop this embryonic group into a congregation.  My French was of a very poor high school quality; in other words it was quite laughable, but the French work in New York City and upper New Jersey was quite young and the organization was quite desperate for volunteers.  Obviously. 

There was a new Bethelite named Dan M. who was part of our fledgling French group.  His French was only marginally better than mine.  I think Dan was very homesick and was experiencing considerable difficulty adjusting to being away from home, in a big city, and the intense regimentation of Bethel.  Anyway, Dan finally went awol.  He simply disappeared.  In my father’s tradition, I determined to find him.  This was at the peak of the race riots of the late sixties and early seventies.  I got a lead that Dan had fled to Newark, and had rented a run-down apartment in a very bad area there.  I took the NYC subways and the PATH trains to Newark and walked the two miles or so from the PATH station to his apartment, passing tanks and armored personnel carriers as I did so.  I was too young and dumb to know I was a white boy and was in danger, so of course nothing happened.  I found Dan, and eventually I believe he made his way back to his family in Wisconsin.

The Haitians were remarkable and unforgettable.  Many of them were illegal immigrants.  When part of a family established a beachhead in America, the extended family came flooding in.  This was in the late sixties, when black America was seething with resentment, and boiling over in one urban area after another.  The Haitians were every bit as black, but for them America represented a Promised Land of opportunity, not of oppression, which is what the black Americans saw.  The race riots of the late sixties did not hold much meaning for me, for Jehovah’s Witnesses really didn’t see color.  Our integration was part of our faith and totally unforced.  It never really occurred to black or white Witnesses to see color.  I can remember participating in church services in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn (an all-black enclave) and looking out the upstairs windows at the armored personnel carriers in the street below.  Some of the Haitian brothers escorted us to the subway station later that night to ensure our safety.

Many of the first Haitians over were quite educated and patrician.  Many of them had intermarried with the occupying French in the previous two centuries, and had sculptured European features and refined tastes in art, theatre, and music.  To be blunt, many of the young women were extraordinarily beautiful.  Most remarkable of all was their attitude.  While the American blacks were burning down and looting their entire neighborhoods, the black Haitians were finding jobs and buying bargain properties.  While the American blacks were protesting the lack of opportunity and justice for blacks, the Haitians were working their way up in the enterprises where they found work, and in a year or two became foremen or bought out the owners.  I am not implying that they came to this country with deep pockets.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  They left a land of primitive voodoo practices and cruel dictatorship of Papa and then Baby Doc (Duvalier) with nothing more than the shirts on their backs.  What they did bring with them was their industriousness, their optimism, and their determination.  Their frame of reference was that in the island they left behind the enslavers were fellow blacks, and what refinements they knew were the legacy of their European forebears.  Their daily language was a native Creole; their educated language was French.

I remember on one occasion entering a Haitian brother’s home.  The usual sheets were hanging from the ceiling, partitioning off various families crowded within the one apartment.  In urgent need of the bathroom, I asked the brother if I could use his bathroom.  He went to check and came back and said ‘Go ahead’.  I entered the bathroom only to discover his wife in there taking a shower.  When I informed him of this fact, he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted to use the toilet.’  Such were the humble beginnings of these people in this country, and I loved them.  Many years later, it would take my government to teach me about racism; among the Haitians we shared affection and a love of life and opportunity.  Ironically, their greatest detractors were the American blacks, who I think resented their successes.  The Haitians never thought of themselves as victims.  If they had known of Jesse Jackson, they would have been quite amused by his rhetoric.

Although these French-speaking congregations in Brooklyn and Newark were composed entirely of Haitians and a handful of us Bethelites, a black American Circuit Overseer named Brother Brown was assigned as our Circuit Overseer.  Brother Brown’s French was considerably worse than mine, which in itself is a stretch of credulity, but I also thought he was very pompous and full of himself.  Having completely forgotten my own egregious sins in the arrogance department just a few years before in Oil City, I felt it encumbent upon me to take some of the wind out of Brother Brown’s sails.  I approached him after a church service one evening and asked to speak to him in private.  Now when a member of the congregation asks for a private audience, you know something of grave concern is about to be brought up.  I explained with a solemn expression that my roommate, a skinny French kid named Dominique, had been obfuscating for some time.  I had not told anyone about it until now, but it was getting out of hand, I explained.  Only this week Dominique had obfuscated publicly, right in the elevator at Bethel.  Obviously, I was counting on (a) Brother Brown not knowing what obfuscation meant, and (b) his not being willing to acknowledge that fact and actually ask me what it meant.  Brother Brown lived up to my expectations, nodded his head gravely, thanked me for bringing this to his attention, and told me he would keep it in confidence and take appropriate action.  Of course when Brother Brown got home and looked up obfuscation in the dictionary, he knew he’d been had.  Brother Brown was never able to look me in the face again.  I learned recently that Brother Brown today is the Public Spokesperson for the organization.  How utterly appropriate.  (In explanation to my reader, the word obfuscate means to obscure.  This word is perhaps most often used to refer to political speeches where the goal is to use a lot of words but conceal your real position on matters.  I chose the word obfuscate because of its double meaning, and also because to a JW elder who is always on the lookout for sexual infractions, it sounded ominous and brought to mind masturbate ???  A triple twist in this situation was that the Latin root words of obfuscate are ob (in the way) and fuscus (dark brown), so my use of obfuscate was also a play on words with Brother Brown.  Oh well, you had to be there.)

The Haitians were very generous.  They stuffed us with as much food as they could, and I learned to love hot peppers from them.  I swear they soaked their peppers in bootlegged battery acid.  Battery acid with intense flavor.  They had endless ways to cook rice and beans, and they were all good.  I also remember they served me once an absolutely godawful drink made out of warm evaporated milk and some kind of corn extract.  I made the terrible mistake of faking satisfaction with this concoction and my stupidity was rewarded with a second glass.  One older couple named Joe and Jeanne Dufresne often loaned me their new Oldsmobile for weekends.  They were at times amused but always appreciative of my struggles with their language.  They too were in a foreign country.  I think they were grateful they were important enough to me to try to learn their language.  Maybe they just secretly got a kick out of hearing me make a fool of myself.

At virtually all assemblies and conventions of Jehovah’s Witnesses, programs begin with a standard Songs and Experiences.  During this brief piece, different members are invited to recount their testimonials of how they made converts, or how they became converts themselves.  These were often emotional, heart-rending recitals that moved the audience to much applause and sometimes even tears.  While in the French work, among the Haitians, we had a summer District Convention, and I was assigned the part Songs and Experiences.  It was my job to find such heart-warming experiences with which to move my audience.   As the deadline of the convention approached, I found no such experiences.  I couldn’t even find any mediocre experiences.  So I did what all of mankind has done since the inception of recorded history; in the absence of facts, I invented.  I fabricated entire accounts of marvelous conversions and had them recited as if they had just recently happened.  The audience was suitably moved, and I made a quick exit after the program to avoid any unsuitable questions.  I didn’t even feel guilty.  Integrity took a distant back seat to advancing the cause.  Citizen Kane had nothing over me;  I fabricated for God while William Randolph Hearst did it to increase circulation of his newspaper..

After a few years a gentleman named Emile C. came up from Haiti.  Unlike the other Haitians, he seemed to view us white guys from Bethel as some kind of colonial power, and he lost no time making it clear he thought we should leave the Haitian congregations to the Haitians.  He was sort of like a virus in the bloodstream, but he was poised and confident and had excellent leadership skills.  I doubt he was really racist; I think we simply represented an impediment to his ambitions.

The driving force behind all these Haitian congregations in the greater New York City area was a young Greek Bethelite named Timothy Galfas.  Timothy was short, lean, and very high energy.  He was a member of the headquarters family, but he spoke excellent French, translation quality, and he had flair.  Lots of it.  Timothy was also an important figure in the production of Bible dramas, Bethel theatre, so to speak.  Jehovah’s Witnesses owned a large movie theatre in Long Island City, and twice a year at graduations of their Gilead missionary school, first class theatrical dramas lasting two or three hours took place.  Seats to these productions were highly prized and hard to come by.  I was recruited as a member of the stage crew, where over the years I participated in constructing props for the dramas, the moving of the props during the actual productions, operating the light bars, etc.  My immediate boss was Fred DiSano, who reported to Timothy Galfas.  Fred was extremely conscientious and like most of us, was full of self-importance.  During rehearsals he would blow a whistle, stop all the action, run up to the stage and move a particular prop about 1/8 inch, go back to his seat and signal for the rehearsal to continue.  Fred was so uptight, his socks in his sock drawer would stand on their ends. 

My sister Joan at Bethel

Fred became my brother-in-law, for my sister had been called to Bethel, and they were dating.  They eventually got married, left headquarters, moved to Phoenix, had two wonderful sons, and stayed together until my sister died of cancer at the age of fifty.  Fred was always anxious and seemed to be born with a worried frown on his face.  Once, many years later in Phoenix, after hearing his latest tale of woe about his job with Delta Airlines, I pulled the car over to the curb in front of a drugstore and told Fred I was going inside to buy him a razor blade so he could slit his wrists and put himself out of his misery.  Fred has mellowed a lot, and during his long career with the airlines showed great presence of mind and courage in several highly intimidating, even dangerous, circumstances.  We remain very good friends.

Timothy on the other hand was the opposite of Fred.  He didn’t sweat the details, and he always knew how to have fun.  He nicknamed me Jean-jean and I learned a lot from Timothy.  Eventually Timothy had me appointed to the censorship committee that previewed any movies that were to be shown to the Bethel family to determine their acceptability.  This was great because it gave us a license to watch everything, and this allowed me to be George Couch and make loud clucking noises about the filth in the movies as I sat riveted to the TV screen.  It was also an excuse for a great guys night, for we would cook in the dorm, drink beer, prop our feet up and rap.  It was Timothy who taught me such esoterica as onions are a soporific, and if you haven’t broken a sweat during sex you’re not really making love.  Timothy was a fanatic about fastening his seatbelt, and whenever he was seated next to a Sister in the car and he was fishing around on the seat for the belt to fasten, he’d cop an occasional feel and I’d hear him say “Rien de personnelle, Soeur.” (Nothing personal, Sister)

It was because of my involvement in the French congregations in the New York City area after work hours that I met the woman I was eventually to marry.  I had been assigned to take any French-speaking telephone calls at headquarters, and one day this woman with a very strong accent called, identifying herself as Madame Maximovich from Belgium.  She said on the plane ride over she had read a French Watchtower magazine, and she had decided she wanted her beautiful daughter to marry a young man from such a fine organization.  I politely told her that was an unusual request but I would arrange for someone who could speak French to visit her and her daughter.  She insisted that she wanted only me to visit.  She informed me her daughter spoke four languages fluently and I should meet her.  She would not be put off, and by now I was wondering if she was some kind of crackpot, so I went to the office of the missionary school and requested that a sister who spoke French  accompany me on this strange visit to the Bronx, where Madame Maximovich lived.  Barbara Newman volunteered and we got acquainted on the long subway ride to the Bronx .  

Wedding Rehearsal in Brooklyn Heights Kingdom Hall 1973

I had a pocket chess set, so Barbara and I played chess on the New York subway.  I let her win.  This was a bad move, and one I was to repeat with Barbara quite often during the years that followed, in other contexts.  We never played chess again, however.  Madame Maximovich’s daughter was everything she said she was, but I became involved instead with Barbara.  We worked together for a few months, and when I finally proposed to her on the Brooklyn Bridge, she said “It’s about time.  I was going to give you another month and then I was going to ask you.”  It used to be a male member of Bethel had to be there for ten years and his fiancée had to be there for four years before they would be allowed to stay as a married couple.  Happily for us, the rule was changed when we got engaged, so we were able to get married and Barbara was brought into the headquarters organization as my wife.

It was about this time that I met Fred Maes.  Fred had a beautiful wife Maggie.  Fred had been a Spanish-speaking Circuit Overseer and even a District Overseer (sort of like an Arch-Bishop) before he was called in to Bethel headquarters.  He was assigned to one of the machines upstairs, but for some reason they let him come down to the Bindery Office a half day a week to counsel bindery boys who had personal problems.  Fred was a real easygoing kind of guy with a million stories about almost anything.  He had a great sense of humor and a funny giggle.  Little did I know that Fred was going to change the rest of my life.  Fred became my first really good friend.

It began one day when Fred told me I had a good way with people and in the same breath cautioned me never to lose it.  First of all, no one had ever said such a thing to me, and I was very flattered.  Secondly, I couldn’t understand why I would lose “it” since I just now found out I had it.   After a while, Fred started inviting me to sit in on his counseling sessions.  I was totally unprepared for this.  I was shocked!  These young men, my age, were so unhappy!  They were homesick, and I was thrilled to be away from home and eating three good meals a day!  They were so horny they could hardly walk, and I hardly knew what a hard-on was.  They were masturbating constantly, going to Manhattan to watch porn flicks.  Some got prostitutes.  Others were banging their girlfriends, a major disfellowshiping offense.   Some cried.  Fred was very kind to them all.  He told some of them to go home.  Fred always had a good joke, and he often made fun of the establishment, a trait that endeared him to the boys.  I remember him parodying George Couch, the guy in charge of all residential issues, flipping through a porn magazine that had been found under one of the boys’ beds and turned in to the Bethel Office by a housekeeper.  He made loud smacking noises of supposed disgust, as he turned page after sordid page, exclaiming over the filth and moral pulchritude even as he was riveted to each picture.

Unknown to me, Fred was a sort of closet subversive.  After we became friends and I earned his trust, he told me that the whole set-up at headquarters was wrong, inhumane, and in need of radical change.  I learned he was friends of Ray Franz, who was a very vocal new addition to the Governing Body, the ruling body of the entire organization.  Ray in turn was the nephew of Fred Franz, who was the reigning ayatollah of the organization, and who kept an iron grip on its theology for over fifty years.  My new friend Fred Maes told me there was division among members of the Governing Body, and a church schism was imminent.  It seems that Ray Franz was the intellectual spearhead of a theological coup against the old school led by his uncle Fred Franz.  Little by little, Fred Maes filled in the blanks for me and I learned which members of the Governing Body were on each side.  The differences were largely theological, although considerable pressure was building about the autocratic abuses of the 2000 or so young men who lived and worked there in exchange for room, board, and a paltry $14 per month stipend.  (No, that wasn’t a typographical error).  Looking back now, this part of my life’s experience was an experiment with social democracy.  I plunged into writing secret essays on formulas to correct the wrongs in our internal society.  I can’t really say I was unhappy about anything myself, but I got into the spirit of things and decided to participate in creating a more perfect world for my distressed young colleagues.  I would join the fight to save them, from themselves, from their horniness, from the rigors and disciplines and injustices of organized manufacturing life.  It was fun, it was exciting, and without knowing it, inside the walls of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ headquarters enclave I had joined my generation of 60’s and 70’s dissidents from all over the world.  As the French would say, I had become a soixante-huitard (a 68′er), a socialist of sorts at the very heart of the Religious Right.  Of course back then, I didn’t know what any of these terms meant.

Now that I was clued in to the struggle for power and influence at the top, I listened with renewed interest to the war of words at morning devotions as various members of the Governing Body used this forum to present their view of things.  As time went on and the battle heated up, it became increasingly clear there were going to be casualties, and Fred Maes and I suspected that some very highly placed people would end up expelled and possibly even disfellowshiped, or banished to spiritual Siberia.  It seemed inevitable that the Old Guard would win, since they controlled the physical assets of the Watchtower corporations and the purse strings.  I identified strongly with the rebels led by Ray Franz, who besides being on the Governing Body, was in the Writing Department.  My friend Fred Maes was a close friend with Ray Franz, so I often had the inside scoop on new developments.  I wondered what terrible things were in store for all of us.

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 home while doing missionary service in Oil City, PA

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.

The three of us missionaries took ourselves entirely too seriously.  We had no sense of humor and were very righteous.  Or should I say self-righteous.  I was the worst.  One time the local congregation leader, a man by the name of Dick K., met us for field service (door-to-door work).  It was bitterly cold out, and he made a remark about it being cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.  I had never heard that expression before, but thought it was entirely improper and reported it to the visiting Circuit Overseer (the JW equivalent of a Catholic Bishop) some weeks later.  I have no idea what the Circuit Overseer did about it.  Hopefully nothing. Much to my chagrin, many years later I learned the real etymology of that benign expression.  It was a naval term from the days of wooden war ships.  Small stacks of cannon balls were held in place on deck by three brass bars called a “monkey” bolted to the deck in the shape of a triangle.  When the weather got cold enough the brass would contract and the cannon balls would go rolling.  But back in Oil City, PA I was a missionary intent on saving the world, and I was young, ignorant, and very full of myself.

 My roommates were named Ricky and David.  David was very anti-women, almost religiously, and it seemed to me he was the most eligible of us three.  I mean he was 6’2” tall, quite handsome, statuesque in a Greek kind of way, and not least, he had a brand new, bright red Chevrolet Chevelle with a posi-traction rear-end.  Ricky had a beat-up, but somewhat cool ‘56 Chevy with a souped up Muncie transmission with a stick shift in the floor and a 283 cubic inch engine, and I had a Volkswagen Beetle.  I guess word spread about the bachelors living on Buffalo Street, because one night the G. brothers from a neighboring congregation showed up on our doorstep with a carload of young girls (meaning our age), and they wanted to know if we wanted to go out.  We politely declined but thanked them for their offer.  We weren’t just righteous, we were stupid.  I can still remember the name of one girl in that car, Marjorie B., from Punxsutawney of the movie Groundhog Day fame.  Even back then I noticed that she was well endowed.  Incredibly, at that time I didn’t understand what to do  about that.

Oil City was however where I debuted on the dating scene.  I invited Dick K.’s mother, who was 81 years old, to accompany me to see The Bible (the movie), which she did.  It was my first date.  I had come of age.   We didn’t kiss, and nothing happened. A small baby step for me.

Happily, after about 10 months I got the summons to Bethel, the headquarters organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York.

As you cross the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, the buildings at the foot of the bridge that formerly were a manufacturing facility for Squibb Pharmaceutical are now all offices of the Watchtower Society, the legal arm of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Likewise, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge all of the buildings are manufacturing facilities and a large dormitory for headquarters staff.  As you travel towards Columbia Heights, beginning with the former Towers Hotel, most of the buildings are JW dorms and offices.  When I left in 1977 there were about 2000 people, mostly single males, who lived and worked there.  It is here that over 60 million hardcover books were printed, bound, and shipped all over the world, and over 10 million copies of both the Awake! and Watchtower were published every two weeks.  Although Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to these two publications as magazines, they were printed on fairly cheap paper that yellowed quickly.  The journalism was equally yellow.  These papers were often quite negative in content.  Like the rest of the media, Jehovah’s Witnesses knew that negativity sells, and people will pay good money to get frightened.  Only Jehovah’s Witnesses were selling salvation, not profits, and bad news brought in converts.  So the worst possible side of any news event was always emphasized, usually as proof positive  that the end was near.  Treatment of any topic was subjected to an apocalyptic spin that supported their beliefs.  Sometimes they were hardly less objective than the media at large.  So while the external media was reporting on Aids, often exaggerating the statistics to gain support for increased federal funding for research and boost ratings, Jehovah’s Witnesses seized on the same exaggerated statistics to demonstrate that no good can possibly come to anyone who violates God’s law on homosexuality, and this of course, was just one more indication that the end was near.  To each their own spin.

These are some of the printing facilities where I learned to bind books for distribution worldwide.

Here in Brooklyn and at their farms in upstate New York Jehovah’s Witnesses operated the most vertically integrated organization imaginable.  They grew their own produce, raised their own dairy, beef, and pork herds, operated their own slaughterhouses, made their own cheese and ice cream, had their own fruit orchards, and transported them in their own truck fleets.  We had three meals a day prepared in a very large, modern kitchen, and served to our tables by a waiter staff.  Two thousand people sat down to eat at the same time every day.  The food was wholesome, and there was lots of it.  We had our dry cleaning shop.  It cost about a dime to get a suit dry cleaned.  There was the shoe repair shop and the laundry.  Once a week we folded and stacked our dirty laundry neatly in a pile and placed it with a printed inventory slip inside a laundry bag and dropped it down a chute.  When we came back from work at noon, our clean laundry was back on our bed, our shirts pressed and folded and everything else in neat piles, military style.  This was not the only similarity with the military.  Our life functioned by bells.  We lived dormitory style, two persons to a room.  The bathrooms were down the hallway.  A bell would ring at 6:30 a.m. to wake us up, and again at 6:55 to inform us morning devotions would begin in five minutes.  All the dining rooms were connected by closed-circuit television so no matter where you sat you could watch the live televised program from a TV monitor near you.  About six members of the headquarters “family” would comment for one minute on the chosen Scriptural text for the day, followed by a church leader who usually spoke for about five minutes.  We had about fifteen or twenty minutes to eat, followed by a stand-up prayer and dismissal to go to work.  A bell rang at 7:55 a.m. to warn us we had five minutes to get to work, and a bell rang at 8:00 a.m. to tell us we should be at work.

Bethel Waiter Crew, July, 1969 Author standing, far left

When you first arrived at Bethel you spent two weeks in Housekeeping training.  Housekeeping was done by the hundred or so women, mostly wives of big shots, who lived there.  They taught us how to make our beds military style, with hospital corners.  Nothing was allowed to be left out.  If you left a stray sock under your bed, it would be placed on top of your bed as a pointed reminder, with a little printed slip telling you not to let this happen again.  After one or two slips of this nature you were summoned to the Bethel Office where you got a lecture.  There were three guys at the Bethel Office you needed to know about.  Dave Parsons had the front desk, and he was a humble and down-to-earth guy.  The next guy, more imposing, was David Madsen.  He was quite tall, statuesque, with blond hair; a true Aryan.  Finally, there was the main man, the Bethel Home Servant, George Couch himself.  If you got to George Couch, you were in serious trouble indeed.  George Couch resembled Lorne Greene on the Bonanza western TV show.  He was the guy who called your parents if you were being expelled.  He was the guy who handled the sexual problems.  Anyway, if your housekeeping problem continued, you stayed in Housekeeping until you were cured or you would be considered unsuitable for Bethel life and asked to leave.  I trained with a new girl named Peggy, who was big boned and busty with long black hair, who went around singing “Come on baby, light my fire” under her breath.  I didn’t quite know what to think of Peggy.  I think she was from New Jersey too.  These New Jersey people were different.

My home from 1969-1977

Another thing that amazed me about my young colleagues was their preoccupation with all things sexual.  Either my sexual desire was repressed or testosterone didn’t kick in until much later, but I didn’t experience any of the angst of my friends.  Some of them were so horny they would get off riding the vibrating saddle of the book sewing machines they operated.  Occasionally one of them would go to the Bethel Office because a girlie magazine had been found in their room by their housekeeper.  Some of them got expelled because they got their girlfriends pregnant The sexual police were ever vigilant at headquarters and occasionally there would be a purge.  This made for very interesting morning devotions, which is where the announcements would be made.  Shortly after I arrived at Bethel over a dozen members were expelled and disfellowshiped at one time for sexual offenses ranging from homosexuality to fornication. Some of these persons were my co-workers on the waiter staff.   Apparently there was a ring of closet gays, some of whom were pretty highly placed and who had been there a long time.  We were regaled at breakfast with the gory details.   One guy, Bill W, from one of the higher-up departments, would invite young new members to his room to offer them free clothes so he could watch them undress.  I was fascinated.  Never having seen a soap, I had had no idea how compelling and fascinating they could be.  Sometimes the president of the Watchtower Society would talk for an hour and a half instead of the usual five or ten minutes, but only when a sexual purge was in progress.

Shortly after you arrived at Bethel you were invited to attend the “New Boy Talk”, a friendly informal chat session with the President and patriarchal head of the Watchtower Society.  He would talk for one whole morning to a group of new Bethlites about sex.  Most of us were pretty ignorant on the subject, and so Brother Knorr would explain wet dreams and the evils of masturbation and fornication, and how to date and marry. In my particular ‘new boy talk’ I remember him encouraging us to take our girlfriends to the beach to find out how well endowed they really were, so there would be no great disappointments later.  I wondered at the time if he was speaking from personal experience and if his wife’s breasts had been smaller than he’d expected.  Again, I thought all this was great since no one was more ignorant on the subject than I was.  I had never seen a naked woman except an extremely occasional photo in National Geographic magazine; I had never dated or kissed a girl, and certainly never frolicked in the back seat with one.  I really wasn’t actually sure what you did when you ‘frolicked’, but I did know it was very bad.

After a while a friend, Dave, also got invited to Bethel and became my roommate.  Dave was a talented machinist so of course he was assigned to the Machine Shop.  For some reason Dave had a hard time adjusting.  He would come back from work complaining that some of his co-workers had put black grease on the inside of the pant legs of his work clothes.  I thought he had flipped.  I was sure of it when very early one morning he woke me up.  He was on his knees by my bedside, bawling his eyes out, and asking me over and over Could I ever forgive him?  I had no idea what he was talking about.  For a while I wondered if he too was a closet gay and perhaps had played with my privates during the night, but I discredited that because I didn’t see how I could sleep through that and not know about it.  One Friday night Dave disappeared without notice, and when I hadn’t heard from him twenty-four hours later, I reported him missing.  Sunday evening he strolled in and casually said he had flown to Buffalo for the weekend.  I went to one of the church leaders about Dave and a short time later Dave left Bethel.  Nothing was ever said about it.  Later I heard that he was disfellowshiped by the local congregation to which he returned.  I never learned why.

After I had been a waiter for nine or ten months, I was transferred to the factory Bindery Department.  Here I learned to operate machinery to put the component parts of a book together with a cover and pack them in boxes for shipping.  I had never been around machinery before, and I found mechanical things uninteresting.    One day we noticed that all the books coming from our “line” had grease on the pages, which meant they were waste.  After some time the overseer of our line discovered the problem:  I had been greasing a grease zerk (a kind of metal nipple that a grease gun fits over) for a machine part that had been long since removed.  Since there were no moving parts that needed the grease, the grease just built up into a big gob and gradually starting dripping down on the books that were passing underneath in the machine.  It had not occurred to me that there was a correlation between friction between moving parts and the need for grease.  I was simply following directions and greasing all the zerks.  Perhaps that was my first day as a bureaucrat.  I had already mastered the fine art of following instructions without thinking.

In time I became a Line Overseer, and I think I became a regular Captain Ahab.  We quickly became one of the highest producers in the bindery (at the time there were thirteen bindery lines).  I pushed my people hard, and convinced most of them to come in early and work late.  One notable exception was Dee H., who stubbornly and blythely refused to go along with the program.  I could never discipline him since he never broke the rules; he just wouldn’t comply with my ambitious agenda.  I was an organizational man now, and Dee was a thorn in my side.  The Floor Overseer (over about 100 guys) was a young black man named Jon W.  Jon hardly ever smiled, but he was a good, and rational boss.  I wanted his job.  The bindery line next to mine was run by an older (late twenties) guy named Wesley B. from Texas.  Wesley was a good overseer and got a lot of work out.  Management never quite approved of Wesley however because he had too much fun.  People on his bindery Line would actually sing, and it wasn’t Kingdom songs either.  We were on the eighth floor of the factory, and I can remember, under Wesley’s leadership, a bunch of us guys were standing at the open windows one summer afternoon serenading a bunch of young pretty female visitors on the sidewalk below with “Devoted to You” complete with harmony.  At the top of our lungs. 

Soon I was transferred to the Bindery Office, where I was an assistant to a guy named Tran A.  Tran ran the Bindery Office and was in charge of inventory control and ordering supplies to keep the bindery running.  Tran was a much better bureaucrat than I was, and when he left Watchtower, I overhauled and simplified his system so that it took a lot less time and eliminated a position.

My boss in the Bindery Office was Ralph L., who ran the whole Bindery, which back then employed about 500 guys.  Ralph was about 40 years old, and taught me a lot about how not to manage an operation.  Ralph worked really really hard, long hours, often finishing up around 9 p.m. at night.  It was quite a job running the bindery, coordinating all the maintenance requirements, scheduling of people on two shifts, and Ralph usually looked haggard.   What I learned from observing my new boss was not to confuse activity with results.  Ralph made his job look impossible.  I learned much later that this is what poor management always looks like.    Ralph didn’t have many of the normal headaches of management.  Employee motivation was not a huge issue.  These workers were all volunteers.  Absenteeism wasn’t much of a problem either, maybe because it was frowned on.  We weren’t supposed to get sick much, so I guess we didn’t.  It was a different world.

Our work lasted until 5:40 p.m. each day.  Several times a week I would go out to meet with local publishers in my congregation.  I was assigned to a small study group that met in the home of the C., a Spanish family that lived near Greenwich Village.  On the weekends we would engage in field service in the Village.  One day I was working alone, and had just climbed the steps of an aging apartment building to the third floor.  On the landing there were three different doors, each leading to a different apartment.  I knocked on the first one and no one answered.  I knocked on the second, and a man came to the door naked.  It didn’t seem to bother him, so I just started talking.  He listened.  The other apartment door opened, and a naked woman came out and walked in behind the guy I was talking to.  Then the first door opened, where no one had answered, and another man came out wearing boxer shorts, and he went in behind the guy I was talking to.  Finally this guy interrupts me and says, You probably don’t want to talk to me.  I’m an actor for Andy Warhol.  I said, Oh, that’s okay, and continued on with my spiel.  I had never heard of Andy Warhol.  It was another ten years before I learned who he was.  Sometimes field service was more interesting than you expected.

John Bechtel          To be continued.

he column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

This is the Kingdom Hall where I gave my first presentation at the age of five.

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 t

Sometimes being a Witness kid was painful, sometimes not.  What I personally hated the most was being required to sit during the national anthem at school.  I felt so conspicuous and I felt it was one of the harder beliefs to defend.  Sometimes I would be derided, even kicked in the back by other kids.  I also got beat up a lot on the school bus.  My father had taught me that if I ever got in trouble at school I would get a whipping at home.  This was my introduction to justice, but I accepted it because it made about as much sense to me as Original Sin (you’re condemned from birth for something you didn’t do).  My solution eventually was to walk the two miles to and from school.  I told my parents I wanted the exercise.

Our school life had three basic groups of kids:  Academic (college preps), Commercial (secretaries and beauticians), and Vocational (the dumb kids).  At least that’s how things were perceived.  Kids can often by cruel, and since I didn’t fit into any of the three groups, I really had no group or clique to attach to at school lunches.  So school lunches became hell for me.  I obviously belonged to the preps, except I wasn’t going to college, so I was ostracized by them.  As a minority of one, without any support group, I became an open target to the VoAg boys, who delighted in throwing food at me or whatever other mischief they could think of.  The school faculty was not particularly sympathetic since they felt I brought this on myself, and my request for permission to spend the lunch period in the library was denied.  There was this one particular kid who took  delight in making my life miserable.  He had flunked two or three years and I found him very intimidating.  I had heard a story about how he had beat up a kid with a lead pipe.  One Sunday afternoon while participating in door-to-door activity, I was up in rotation in the car to take the next house and there was this same guy out in the front yard.  I expressed considerable concern, but agreed to take my turn.  I gave this kid my entire spiel and he stood there and said nothing.  When I concluded with an offer of some publications, he politely refused.  The following Monday he sent one of his cronies over to me in the lunchroom to tell me never to come to his house again.  The harassment in the lunchroom stopped from that day forward, however.  There was, however, the sense of total alienation from the outside world; we knew we did not belong.  And we knew that same sense of alienation was our badge of honor, proof positive of our righteousness.

  When I had books I read.  But most of the time I was simply alone.  We were very poor, but most of the time I don’t think I was really aware of this.  The exception to this was in grade school when everyone in our class would order new paperback books.  When the delivery came in, the teacher would go up and down the rows, handing out paperback books, small piles on each desk, and my desk was always conspicuously empty.  That was probably the only occasion when I really felt our poverty.  I would have given my right arm to be able to order even one paperback book.  I felt very left out.  The books typically cost $.25.  We couldn’t afford it.

My mother taught my sister Joan and I pride of ownership.  We were required to keep our tiny trailer scrupulously clean.  I always wore a suit to the Kingdom Hall, which my parents usually purchased at the second-hand clothing stores.  At an early age my mother taught me to polish my shoes and iron my own clothes.  She even taught me how to keep a crease in a pair of trousers by running a bar of soap up and down in the inside of the crease before pressing them.  The hot iron would melt the soap and keep the crease.  The soap would wash out in the next cleaning.  Since our trailer was so small, nothing was allowed to be left out, since there was no space to leave anything.  Because  I slept on the ancient sofa-bed, my bed had to be made and put back in place as a sofa before I went to school every day.  Mom taught us there was a difference between not having and not caring.  She also taught us that no one was coming to clean up after us, and that we were responsible for ourselves.  I can truthfully say it never occurred to us to expect help from outside agencies or people, and if anyone we did not know would have suggested such a thing, we would have viewed them with suspicion.  Why were they offering this?  What was their motive?  What did they want from us?  This wasn’t their problem.  It also never occurred to us to blame anyone for our situation.  We never once thought it was someone else’s fault that we were poor; as a matter of fact, we didn’t think in terms of “fault”, anyone’s fault.  Our situation wasn’t about fault; it just was.  The poor who think this way today have been taught to think this way mostly by others who have never been poor themselves, who understand neither poverty nor money, and who therefore are often trying to expiate some form of misguided personal guilt for having so much when others have so little.

My sister, Joan, and I, with Daddy at a Jehovah's Witness convention.

My father on the other hand was always in a hurry, and could be relied on to make some very poorly-thought-out choices.  He always seemed to find the worst lot in the trailer court; the one with an underground cesspool running below us, causing our yard to sink and stink.  I spent one whole summer hauling topsoil from a nearby wood to our yard to fill in the sinkhole.  It seemed the more I hauled, the further it sank.  Eventually my mother and I planted a lot of petunias around the trailer to distract attention from the sinkhole.

No matter how poor you are, it always feels good to find someone who has less than you do.  We had the W. family.  The W’s  were a mentally handicapped family, and the father made and sold brooms for a living.  They  were generally considered ‘poor white trash’ and they kept a lot of cats, dogs, and chickens in their house.  I hated to go to their house because it smelled too bad.  I didn’t want to go inside.  A group of Brothers and Sisters got together from time to time to go clean up the W’s, and they’d get rid of half the animals and wash the place down.  But in no time at all the W’s had it just as filthy as before.  Well, eventually my Dad packed us and moved us and our trailer out of that community, and we moved a couple hours away to a different state, and we thought that was the end of the W’s for us.  Well imagine our surprise when we looked out a window of our trailer in its new location and saw the W’s outside, their car packed to the top and mattresses tied to the roof!  I don’t know what my parents did to get rid of them, but they finally went away.  The W’s were my first lesson in socio-economics:  Being poor means you have no money; Poverty is a state of mind.  We were poor, but we had our standards and our pride.

I don’t remember my mother talking to us about Daddy in economic terms, and so it took me a long time to figure out that our poverty was directly related to poor judgments Daddy made, usually at the encouragement of the organization.  My father had excellent woodworking skills and was a truly fine cabinet maker.  He was quite capable of earning a solid middle-class living.  We were poor because he would repeatedly uproot us, quit his job, and tear off down the road to a new location like a Pony Express rider gone berserk, dragging us along behind him with little or no planning.  The organization had said they needed him  here or there, and my father never failed to respond to that clarion call.  My father thought that to tend to his own needs first would be selfish and a betrayal of everything he believed in, and of course he was absolutely right.  What he did not realize was that he followed an unliveable creed, and that the only way to survive and thrive materially was to practice it hypocritically, tongue-in-cheek.  To do otherwise was in essence to take a vow of poverty.

My father knew that “Happy were the poor, for to them belongs the kingdom of the heavens” and he also knew “that it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get in the kingdom of the heavens.”  Sometimes we would drive by affluent homes, or witness in their neighborhoods, and we used to contemplate how miserable these people must be. And of course, we were constantly reminded that these people had to be dishonest and avaricious to have so much when others, such as us, had so little.  In my father’s mind, if you had a lot more materially than someone else, you must have taken it from them.  Later, I learned that historically, before the invention of capitalism and free trade, the accumulation of wealth and prestige usually was only possible by taking it from others by force.  Those in a medieval community who were honored with special titles and were viewed as “nobility” were also those who had been given their land and titles as a reward for having served in a victorious army that had seized the property of others by force.  Or they were the descendents of such people.  My father was far too uneducated to understand that in a system of free trade, wealth could be created where none existed before by creating and satisfying the needs of others.  And once again, much later I was to learn that my father’s ignorance on this subject was by no means limited to others like himself, fundamentalist believers or the envious poor; a failure to understand the sources of wealth under free enterprise is widely misunderstood and is often the cause of feelings of unearned guilt, particularly among the descendents of successful entrepreneurs, those who benefited from this phenomenon without understanding it.

My father would get very angry with others who were padding their nest while he was sacrificing.  Many years later I would marvel at this same phenomenon in the ‘caviar a gauche’, leftist-leaning politicians who encourage the masses to sacrifice, usually in the form of burdensome taxes, in order to save the poor, save the children, save the environment, save the you-name-it, while they used their public position to line their pockets handsomely or appropriate to themselves privileges of power denied to others whose “equality” they pretended to protect.

I learned many enduring lessons from growing up in poverty, some of which I will discuss in depth later on in this book.  Two of the most memorable, however, are (1) No one can save you from yourself, and (2) When someone comes along and tells you all what they are going to do for you, grab your wallet and run like hell.  When someone preaches about saving the poor, you can be sure they don’t actually want to meet any except possibly on an election campaign trail for a photo op, and you can be damn sure that they don’t want you on their side of town.  They prefer to experience their poor “from a distance.”  And I can assure you no one who grew up as I did would equate poverty with virtue as is so politically correct to do today.  When anyone tries to sell you that you are not responsible, if not for your condition, then for changing it; when someone tries to convince you that someone, anyone, owes you, and that you are a victim, you have to stop and ask yourself what’s in this for them.  When they sell self-pity, and your neediness becomes a source of arrogance, they are championing your neediness in order to enhance their status as the ones who can impose a solution to your problems on others.  In effect such politicos and do-gooders have set feudalism on it’s head, and inverted the use of force, making the serfs the new nobility, with themselves as the new king-makers.  They sell “rights” to the unearned as a shortcut and substitute for freedom of opportunity in much the same way as the medieval Catholic Church sold indulgences to the ignorant.

Mom had a love-hate relationship with the organization.  Some of their teachings made her bristle in protest, and at other times she was contrite, sincere, and loyal.  At one point in time when I was about fifteen,  I was riding in the back seat of the car and I leaned forward and asked my parents ‘What should you do if you really don’t believe this?  My mother’s answer was, ‘You know it’s the truth with your mind, so if you don’t believe it you must have a bad heart.  So pray to God for a good heart and keep doing the right thing until your prayer is answered.’  That guilt trip kept me in the faith for another 15 years.

By the time I was 16 years old, I was in open rebellion against my father.  I told him privately that I had no respect for him and I disapproved of the way he treated Mom.  I seized on the idea of going to Barber School as a way to get out of both High School and home at the same time.  It was vocational so it should meet with the church’s approval.  I asked my father, and of course he opposed the idea.  At the next Assembly, my father hauled me in front of the District Overseer so I could be lectured about obedience to my father.  Instead, Brother  R. listened to me and then dismissed me.  In the conversation with my father that ensued I think he advised my father that maybe he was being too harsh with me, because the next week my father okayed me going to Barber School during my senior year at High School.  He and my sister even cooperated together to provide me with a car so I could drive to the barber school on Pratt Street in Baltimore.

I needed to get away from High School as much as I needed to get away from my father.  My older sister Joan bought me a Volkswagen Beetle, and I started driving to North Carroll High School, where  I got flat tires once or twice a week–every week.  Finally a guy followed me into the Boys Restroom and told me to look for nails under my tires before I pulled out of the parking lot.  He said the flat tires were not an accident, and told me who was planting the nails.  I went to the school office and asked permission to park in the front of the school in the faculty parking lot, and they agreed, and that was the end  of that problem.

We were living in Westminster, Maryland at the time, and my father took me down to Baltimore to show me how to get to the Avara School of Barbering on Pratt St.  He emphasized that if I ever had an accident to never admit it was my fault, even if I thought it was, because his insurance agent had told him it created problems for the insurance company if I did so.  In my second week of barber school, I went through a Stop Sign and was hit broadside and totaled my car.  The police officer said if I would admit it was my fault, he wouldn’t even issue a citation.  Of course I couldn’t do that.  I had my instructions.  So I totaled my car and got the citation.  I had to go to remedial driving school and watch a bunch of gory documentaries about awful traffic accidents.  Barber school was new and fun, and away from home.  It was Relief spelled with a capital R.  The school was owned by three middle-aged Italian brothers, Simon Avara, the acting manager, and Vince, a big, tall guy, and Charlie, who only came in for an occasional haircut.  He was a delegate to the State Assembly, and he was extremely particular about his hair.  There was this one skinny Italian barber student named Jerry there, and I often worked late at night with him.  One night we were the only ones there, and someone knocked on the door of the Barber Shop.  Jerry answered the door, and I heard bits and pieces of this conversation, and I heard Jerry say, No, I’m not going all the way to Catonville for a $5 bag.  Later I asked him what he was talking about, and he said marijuana.  That was my first exposure to drug trafficking.  At long last, I felt I was growing up.

The worst part about going to Barber School was learning to shave men with a straight razor.  We were located in a rather seedy neighborhood, and these old bums used to come in for a cheap haircut and shave from us students.  I would soak their face with hot towels and lather them up, and my hands would tremble as I picked up the straight razor.  A lot of these bums had large folds of loose skin on their face and throat, and you had to stretch their skin out with your other hand so you could get at their beard.  There were lots of accidents and we always had a generous supply of styptic powder on hand to stop the bleeding.  These poor guys would just fall asleep in the chair.  I hated to do the shaves.

It was a uni-sex shop, and we learned to cut women’s hair too.  I preferred to do the men, however.  If you messed up a woman’s hair, she would cry or make a big fuss.  The guys would just shrug and leave.  We had two women students in the shop, and I thought they were both attractive, but they hardly knew I existed.  I’m sure I looked prepubescent to them.

I took the final exam at the school to get my apprentice license.  The exam had a lot of fill-in-the-blank questions on bones and muscles of the body.  I never did figure out why anybody thought we needed to know that stuff in order to cut hair, but anyway I got a perfect score on the exam.  The next week when I came into the school, Simon Avara called me into his office and accused me of cheating on the exam.  He said I got 100% on the exam, and they knew I was cheating because I even spelled every word correctly. He wanted to know how I did it.   I asked him to ask me a question from the exam, which he did.  I told him the answer:  the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and then I spelled it for him.  We did a few more like that, and he apologized for the accusation.  I  graduated from Barber School and practiced the trade for one whole summer.  I worked in one shop that catered to the wealthy and charged an outrageous $7.00 for a haircut (in 1967) for all of six weeks, and then I transferred to the GlenBurnie  Farmers Market where the haircuts cost $1.25, of which I got to keep $.90.  There were nine barbers, and we moved so fast that we kept several sets of electric clippers because they would overheat.  Somebody would sit in my chair, and as I started to cover him with the barber cloth I would inquire how he wanted his hair cut, and about the time he finished his explanation I would whip the cloth off him and be finished.  There was always a line of about 30 people out the door waiting for haircuts, and I remember one long Saturday when I did 67 haircuts.  Our barber shop did over 430 haircuts that day.  Certain haircuts took longer and were more difficult than others.  Flat Tops were to be avoided.  They could drive you crazy, getting the top, well, flat.  So I would observe who was next in line and I would slow down or speed up accordingly in order to avoid the Flat Tops.  I could do two regular haircuts in the time of one Flat Top.  Eventually the other barbers caught on to my game and complained to the managing barber and he talked to me about it.  About that time I quit, because the Lord had called.

I still had two problems, both of them serious.  One of them was my father, and the other was the military draft.  To avoid Vietnam, I needed to get a 4-D classification, which was a ministerial exemption.  The only way to do this was to be a Pioneer, and even then the Draft Board was getting sticky about it.  If you got called to Bethel, you would be exempted, but Bethel wouldn’t accept you unless you were already exempted, so that was a Catch-22.  I had been working very diligently at collecting affidavits from everybody under the sun about my practice of the ministry, and was holding my breath.  If I didn’t get my exemption, I would have to go to jail, because we didn’t believe in joining the armed forces.  We weren’t even allowed to declare ourselves as Conscientious Objectors and do substitute service.  We had to be sentenced first, and then do exactly the same work we would have been assigned as a CO, but now as a prisoner.  That would prove that we had not compromised.  A delicate, but important difference.  Or so the organization thought.

I also knew I was going to have to use the church to get out from under my dad.  He didn’t approve of anything I did, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me go either.  Unless of course the organization told him to.  So I wrote to headquarters at Bethel and asked to be assigned to serve where the ‘need was great.’

I got my draft exemption and my assignment.

To be continued.