In 1972, Elaine and I bought our very first house, in Rodeo, California. That’s across the bay from San Francisco. It was a small house, but it was a pretty house, and it was well built by the architect from whom we bought it. At the time, it was less than six months old, and the architect who built in it was living in it when he sold it to us. Elaine and I planned to live there for the next several years, so we bought gardening and landscaping books and spent hours and hours planning and reading. We planted decorative trees in front; for example, a flowering crabapple tree. We dedicated the large back yard to fruit trees. We planted trees for apples, peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, apricots, lemons and oranges, figs, cumquats, and I don’t know what all; I think even avocados. We also planted a vegetable garden, squash and tomatoes mainly.
I also designed and built, with the help of a friend of mine named Delbert, an elaborate multi-circuit sprinkler system that worked on timers. Next, Elaine and I planted the whole yard with Dichondra seeds and then pulled weeds by the thousands for months after they germinated. The end result was very satisfying, though. After we had lived there for about two years, things were beginning to look pretty nice, and we were feeling good about the result of our thousands of hours of hard work. But then late in 1974, I took a new job in El Paso, and we had to sell the house and move.
Eventually, after moving from El Paso to Washington, D. C. and then back to El Paso again, we wound up in Houston in 1985, and we have remained here ever since. For the last twenty years of my career, I was a private consultant, and on occasion I had to testify in court. In 1999, I had to go to San Francisco to testify in a trial. After the trial was over, I had the whole afternoon left before I had to return to Houston. I thought about driving out to see our first home, which I had not seen for twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. Then I thought again, and I said to myself that, given some of my past experiences in this sort of thing, no doubt the person who owned the house now, or maybe some owner before him, had long since uprooted or chopped down all the fruit trees that Elaine and I had planted with tender loving care so long ago. By going out there, all I would be doing is setting myself up for a major disappointment.
But I really did want to see the first house we had ever owned, and I eventually succumbed to my curiosity and drove out to Rodeo, while at the same time I was preparing myself for a bitter disappointment. When I got to the neighborhood, however, I immediately perked up when I saw that the flowering crabapple tree was still out there in front of the house. That was a good sign, the way I saw it. I drove up and down the street and around the neighborhood, before I finally got up the nerve to park the car at the street curb and go up and knock on the door.
A middle-aged man came to the door. I judged him to be probably my age plus or minus a few years. I said hello and told him my name and said that I was the original owner of his house, or well, almost the original owner. I said, for example, that I knew that the kitchen and dining rooms were on my left, the living room was right behind him, and the master bedroom was on the far right end at the back of the house. I told him he had a fireplace that opened out to the dining room on one side and the living-room on the other, which was unusual. I also told him that I knew he had a sundeck outside the master bedroom and a concrete patio running along the rest of the back of the house, and that the master bedroom, the living room, and the dining room all three opened out onto the sundeck or the patio through sliding glass doors. And, finally, I told him, unless some previous owner had cut them all down, he had an orchard of fruit trees in his back yard that my wife and I had planted a quarter of a century ago.
He grinned and stated that I had convinced him, and he asked me if I would like to see the back yard. Well, sure, of course! I said. I thought you’d never ask! I said. He invited me into the house, and nothing much that I could see had been changed in the kitchen, dining, and living room areas. Then he took me through one of the glass doors onto his patio and into the back yard. I was astonished. Indeed, I was surprised and delighted. No grass grew anywhere. That’s because all the fruit trees provided such dense shade. Most of them were bearing fruit, and the owner got a grocery bag and started picking plums and lemons and oranges and so on, and putting them in the bag, which he gave to me. I thanked the man for his kindness and took the bag home, where Elaine and I, at long last, got a taste of the fruits of our labors long-past.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
The Tree House and the Sky-Ride
We lived in El Paso during two different time periods. During the first period, from roughly 1975 to 1979, we lived in an area that was called the Upper Valley, located outside the city limits. We lived on an acre of land that had previously been planted in cotton and alfalfa, and therefore was devoid of any trees or grass until we planted some. Our house was about six months old when we moved in. We bought it from another company employee who was quitting or being transferred to another location, I forget which.
Anyway, I should have said when I moved in, not when we moved in. You see, I moved to El Paso about two months before Elaine and Neal and Glen did, because although we had a buyer for our home in Rodeo, California, the sale had not yet gone through closing. I thought I got a pretty good deal on the Upper Valley house, but Elaine never particularly liked it. Let this be a lesson to all husbands: Do not ever, ever buy a house to live in, without first letting your wife inspect it.
Being young and active at that time, I was always involved in one project or another. In addition to my work for pay, that is. There was a huge cottonwood tree on the edge of our property adjacent to a county road that passed by. I decided that that tree desperately needed a well-built tree-house in it. The trunk of the tree divided into three main limbs about 15 feet off the ground. I designed a tree house with a cantilevered support for the fourth corner of the tree house floor, using two 4” X 6” X 15’ beams that I hauled up into the tree using ropes and pulleys, since I had nobody to help me, and that I secured to the tree with 60-penny nails.
Sixty-penny nails are six inches long and almost a quarter of an inch in diameter; technically, they are spikes. I got really good at driving nails. I learned how to hold the hammer near the end of the handle, and haul back like a major league baseball pitcher and let ‘r go, and I got to where I could drive a 60-penny nail in with two strokes, three maximum, the first to set the nail and the second, or third, sometimes, to drive it home. Before I got that good however, I smashed the you-know-what out of the end joint of my left little finger. Ever since then, it has been a little bit flattened-out and about half again as large as the end of my right little finger. Moreover, in the last few years I have developed a big ugly knot on the end joint of the left one.
I built the tree house floor out of Douglas fir, tongue-in-groove, 2” X 6” X 10’ planks. I got the wood from a retired and dismantled railroad caboose at a wrecking yard in Canutillo, New Mexico, located approximately 20 miles from where we lived. The tree house had one hundred square feet of floor space, ten feet by ten feet. I built side guardrails and benches around the inside, put up a roof, and also I built a window facing a telephone pole that stood out at the back end of my property, about 75 to 100 yards away, in slightly diagonal direction.
Then I built a sky-ride, as I called it then, but known as a zip-line nowadays, so I have been informed by my now-grownup children. I got enough ¼” steel cable to reach from the tree to the telephone pole. I attached one end of the cable to the tree, at a point about ten feet higher than the floor of the tree house. I attached the other end of the cable to the telephone pole, about six or eight feet off the ground.
Elaine’s sister, Jane, and my brother-in-law, Ricky, happened to be visiting on a weekend that I had planned to be working on the sky-ride, so I took Ricky with me to a local wrecking yard to look for some kind of wheel contraption suitable to install on the cable that would allow you to ride it down to the ground. After a couple of hours of searching, we found a slaughterhouse hook with a ball-bearing-swivel-pulley-wheel assembly, which henceforth I’ll just call the pulley. It was perfect. I immediately bought it and took it home and installed it on the cable.
Next, I attached a horizontal piece of pipe to the pulley to serve as a trapeze bar, and I made a string pull-back system, so that after you rode the cable down to the end, the next person in the tree house could pull the trapeze back up. Finally, I roto-tilled the ground near the telephone pole, from the pole back to about 20 feet up the line, so that when you rode the line down, you would have a soft landing. The more that you weighed, the farther out from the pole you touched down.
Neal and Glen really liked playing in the tree house and riding on the sky-ride. Neal would sometimes turn upside down and swivel round and round on the way down. Here he is in this picture.
Glen was not heavy enough or tall enough at that time to touch down on the dirt with his feet at the end of the line before he slammed into the telephone pole, so some of us in the neighborhood would stand a few feet in front of the pole and catch him, more-or-less softly, before he hit it.
I must have worked at least five hundred hours to build that tree house and sky-ride, and I was really glad they were such a success. I was so happy that my children liked it. I had put my heart and soul (and little bit of my left little finger) into building them, and I was very proud of the result. To tell the honest truth, I myself thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the tree house of an evening and riding the sky-ride down from time to time.
Neighborhood kids liked the sky-ride so much that I had to lock it up when I wasn’t around. In about 1977, I met a French engineer named Herve (pronounced kind of like Airvay), with whom I worked for a couple of years. Herve had three daughters, all under the age of ten or twelve I think. One weekend afternoon, Herve and his family came out to visit and have a cookout or something like that. Herve’s daughters immediately started lobbying him to let them ride the sky-ride. After awhile he agreed to it, and his girls and my boys proceeded to have a blast! I can’t recall if Herve himself rode the sky-ride, but I know I did.
In August of 1977, one of my nephews, Howe, and his mom, Vicki, one of my sisters-in-law, came out from Georgia to visit us. Naturally, we did some fun and touristy things. For example, we went to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, New Mexico, and we went to a bull fight in Juarez, Mexico. However, whenever we were at home – da dum – we rode the sky-ride!
Here is a picture of Howe about to jump out of the tree house window.
And, here he is going down:
Sometimes, Neal and Howe would both ride the sky-ride down together, as they are about to do in this photograph.
I think about that summer visit from time to time, and I wonder if Neal and Howe and Glen remember it the way I do. In early 1979, we had to move to Washington, D. C., and we had to sell the house (and the tree house!). By that time, Elaine and I had done a substantial amount of landscaping, and we had a slatted roof built over the patio that ran the whole length of the back of the house. This was the second time we had busted our butts for two or three years to landscape a home, only to have to move out right after we got it done. It kind of bummed us out, but at the time I believed that my career potential would improve significantly if I accepted the D. C. assignment. Having to leave the tree house behind especially stuck in my craw, though.
We lived in D. C. (actually, McLean, Virginia) for about three years, but after about two years there, I had to go back to El Paso on a business trip. When I got there, I couldn’t resist driving out to the Upper Valley for another look at the marvelous tree house and sky-ride that I had built and that the kids had universally loved. But when I drove by, I was stunned. I was so grossed out I almost ran off the road, because I saw that the people living there now had torn it all down! I was depressed and disappointed all the way home.
Anyway, I should have said when I moved in, not when we moved in. You see, I moved to El Paso about two months before Elaine and Neal and Glen did, because although we had a buyer for our home in Rodeo, California, the sale had not yet gone through closing. I thought I got a pretty good deal on the Upper Valley house, but Elaine never particularly liked it. Let this be a lesson to all husbands: Do not ever, ever buy a house to live in, without first letting your wife inspect it.
Being young and active at that time, I was always involved in one project or another. In addition to my work for pay, that is. There was a huge cottonwood tree on the edge of our property adjacent to a county road that passed by. I decided that that tree desperately needed a well-built tree-house in it. The trunk of the tree divided into three main limbs about 15 feet off the ground. I designed a tree house with a cantilevered support for the fourth corner of the tree house floor, using two 4” X 6” X 15’ beams that I hauled up into the tree using ropes and pulleys, since I had nobody to help me, and that I secured to the tree with 60-penny nails.
Sixty-penny nails are six inches long and almost a quarter of an inch in diameter; technically, they are spikes. I got really good at driving nails. I learned how to hold the hammer near the end of the handle, and haul back like a major league baseball pitcher and let ‘r go, and I got to where I could drive a 60-penny nail in with two strokes, three maximum, the first to set the nail and the second, or third, sometimes, to drive it home. Before I got that good however, I smashed the you-know-what out of the end joint of my left little finger. Ever since then, it has been a little bit flattened-out and about half again as large as the end of my right little finger. Moreover, in the last few years I have developed a big ugly knot on the end joint of the left one.
I built the tree house floor out of Douglas fir, tongue-in-groove, 2” X 6” X 10’ planks. I got the wood from a retired and dismantled railroad caboose at a wrecking yard in Canutillo, New Mexico, located approximately 20 miles from where we lived. The tree house had one hundred square feet of floor space, ten feet by ten feet. I built side guardrails and benches around the inside, put up a roof, and also I built a window facing a telephone pole that stood out at the back end of my property, about 75 to 100 yards away, in slightly diagonal direction.
Then I built a sky-ride, as I called it then, but known as a zip-line nowadays, so I have been informed by my now-grownup children. I got enough ¼” steel cable to reach from the tree to the telephone pole. I attached one end of the cable to the tree, at a point about ten feet higher than the floor of the tree house. I attached the other end of the cable to the telephone pole, about six or eight feet off the ground.
Elaine’s sister, Jane, and my brother-in-law, Ricky, happened to be visiting on a weekend that I had planned to be working on the sky-ride, so I took Ricky with me to a local wrecking yard to look for some kind of wheel contraption suitable to install on the cable that would allow you to ride it down to the ground. After a couple of hours of searching, we found a slaughterhouse hook with a ball-bearing-swivel-pulley-wheel assembly, which henceforth I’ll just call the pulley. It was perfect. I immediately bought it and took it home and installed it on the cable.
Next, I attached a horizontal piece of pipe to the pulley to serve as a trapeze bar, and I made a string pull-back system, so that after you rode the cable down to the end, the next person in the tree house could pull the trapeze back up. Finally, I roto-tilled the ground near the telephone pole, from the pole back to about 20 feet up the line, so that when you rode the line down, you would have a soft landing. The more that you weighed, the farther out from the pole you touched down.
Neal and Glen really liked playing in the tree house and riding on the sky-ride. Neal would sometimes turn upside down and swivel round and round on the way down. Here he is in this picture.
Glen was not heavy enough or tall enough at that time to touch down on the dirt with his feet at the end of the line before he slammed into the telephone pole, so some of us in the neighborhood would stand a few feet in front of the pole and catch him, more-or-less softly, before he hit it.
I must have worked at least five hundred hours to build that tree house and sky-ride, and I was really glad they were such a success. I was so happy that my children liked it. I had put my heart and soul (and little bit of my left little finger) into building them, and I was very proud of the result. To tell the honest truth, I myself thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the tree house of an evening and riding the sky-ride down from time to time.
Neighborhood kids liked the sky-ride so much that I had to lock it up when I wasn’t around. In about 1977, I met a French engineer named Herve (pronounced kind of like Airvay), with whom I worked for a couple of years. Herve had three daughters, all under the age of ten or twelve I think. One weekend afternoon, Herve and his family came out to visit and have a cookout or something like that. Herve’s daughters immediately started lobbying him to let them ride the sky-ride. After awhile he agreed to it, and his girls and my boys proceeded to have a blast! I can’t recall if Herve himself rode the sky-ride, but I know I did.
In August of 1977, one of my nephews, Howe, and his mom, Vicki, one of my sisters-in-law, came out from Georgia to visit us. Naturally, we did some fun and touristy things. For example, we went to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, New Mexico, and we went to a bull fight in Juarez, Mexico. However, whenever we were at home – da dum – we rode the sky-ride!
Here is a picture of Howe about to jump out of the tree house window.
And, here he is going down:
Sometimes, Neal and Howe would both ride the sky-ride down together, as they are about to do in this photograph.
I think about that summer visit from time to time, and I wonder if Neal and Howe and Glen remember it the way I do. In early 1979, we had to move to Washington, D. C., and we had to sell the house (and the tree house!). By that time, Elaine and I had done a substantial amount of landscaping, and we had a slatted roof built over the patio that ran the whole length of the back of the house. This was the second time we had busted our butts for two or three years to landscape a home, only to have to move out right after we got it done. It kind of bummed us out, but at the time I believed that my career potential would improve significantly if I accepted the D. C. assignment. Having to leave the tree house behind especially stuck in my craw, though.
We lived in D. C. (actually, McLean, Virginia) for about three years, but after about two years there, I had to go back to El Paso on a business trip. When I got there, I couldn’t resist driving out to the Upper Valley for another look at the marvelous tree house and sky-ride that I had built and that the kids had universally loved. But when I drove by, I was stunned. I was so grossed out I almost ran off the road, because I saw that the people living there now had torn it all down! I was depressed and disappointed all the way home.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Parking Lot Ethics
When I arrived on campus to begin my freshman year at college, I desperately needed money. I was almost penniless. I had a scholarship that would pay for my tuition and dorm fees, but it wouldn’t provide anything for food and books and other stuff. I decided to go see the campus athletic director, to see if he might have a job for me. I don’t recall what inspired me to do this, but it turned out to be a brilliant idea. It just so happened – so the athletic director said – that he did have a little job for me if I wanted it. It was not a full-time job (which I didn’t want anyway), and it was not a permanent job, but I could have it until he said otherwise. The job was selling parking tickets for the home football games.
He gave me a roll of 100 tickets for the first game, and he took me out to see a parking lot. It was a good lot, close to the stadium entrance. It was fenced off by itself, separate and apart from the main stadium parking lot, which was a whole heap bigger than this lot. I was supposed to arrive one hour prior to kickoff time and open the lot. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. He told me if I brought him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs on the Monday afternoon following the Saturday night game, he would pay me $5.00. I thought Wow! I can buy four or five meals with that! I thanked him sincerely and took the roll of tickets back to the dorm.
Well, I got to the football stadium on Saturday night of the opening home game, an hour ahead of the scheduled kickoff time. I opened the parking lot and started selling the tickets. Now, you know, when you go somewhere like a movie, you typically buy a ticket at a ticket booth, and then you continue on into the theater and give your ticket to some gate-keeper, who tears the ticket up and gives you the stub. If you think that you might have to leave the movie in the middle and go out past the gate-keeper, then you had better keep the stub, or you won’t be able to get back in. At some places, they won’t let you back in period; for example, most live theaters, but that’s beside the point. In this particular operation, there was only me, and not a one of these hometown fans was likely to leave during the game. Consequently, most of the people driving through just dropped their ticket stubs on the ground within a couple of feet of me.
Now, it might sound easy selling parking lot tickets, but there was more to it than I had previously given much thought to. I kept the roll of tickets in the left hip pocket of my sports coat. I kept the cash in my right pants pocket and my ticket stubs from people I had sold tickets to in the right hip pocket of my sports coat. After I had sold a number of tickets, I started picking up the ticket stubs that people had tossed, and I stuffed them in my left pants pocket. I don’t recall exactly what possessed me to do this, but it turned out to be an unwitting inspiration.
After I had sold all the tickets on the roll, I was still looking at a long line of people who wanted to park, and there was still a lot of vacant space left in the lot. So, I started selling the prior patrons’ ticket stubs from my left pants pocket, and putting the cash into the left breast pocket of my sports coat. (Well, what the hell would you have done?) I kept selling the stubs over and over again like that, until a cop who was covering the lot walked over and told me it was all full now, which it was, and that the kickoff had already occurred (as if I cared!). I had sold something close to 500 tickets, and I was holding the first $100 in my right pants pocket and the remaining $400 or thereabouts in the left breast pocket of my sports coat. I was euphoric. $400 in little more than an hour’s work! (Little did I know at the time that that was the highest hourly rate I would ever make during my entire lifetime!) When I got to my seat in the stadium that my roommate was holding for me, along with our dates, he immediately sensed that something was up, but I gave him the mum’s-the-word sign, and I told him about it later on back at the dorm.
On the following Monday afternoon, I reported to the athletic director as instructed, and I gave him his $100 and the 100 ticket stubs that I had kept in the right pocket of my sports coat. He said good job young fella, and gave me $5.00. He also gave me another roll of 100 tickets for the next game, with the same instructions as before. Well, I continued that gig for three or four home games, until one black Monday afternoon he told me he was sorry, but that one of his football players needed a job and he had to give preference to him. By that time I had made more than $1000 from that job, and my only regret was that it wouldn’t be more.
Back at the dorm, my parking-lot caper became the subject of seemingly endless philosophical debates about the ethics of what I had done. Several of my dorm mates argued that it was highly unethical. I told them they were just envious. I said that if I had not resold the ticket stubs, all those people who had bought them would have had to find other parking places that would have been much farther from the stadium entrance and would have cost more besides.
I also pointed out that most, if not all, of the people I sold tickets to, were avid hometown fans who had probably been parking there for years, so they no doubt knew how big the lot was. If I had closed the gate after selling only 100 tickets, they might have gotten angry; they might have even threatened me physically.
Moreover, I had kept my bargain with the athletic director to a tee. His instructions had been quite specific. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. I was to bring him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs, and he would pay me $5.00. That’s exactly what happened.
The athletic director had been there for a long time, and he must surely have known how many cars the lot would hold. Therefore, I figured that the way I “played the game”, so to speak, was the way it was apparently intended to be played. Nobody was cheated out of any money. Nobody paid for anything he didn’t get. I made some money on the deal, and if I could do it again, I would do it again.
He gave me a roll of 100 tickets for the first game, and he took me out to see a parking lot. It was a good lot, close to the stadium entrance. It was fenced off by itself, separate and apart from the main stadium parking lot, which was a whole heap bigger than this lot. I was supposed to arrive one hour prior to kickoff time and open the lot. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. He told me if I brought him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs on the Monday afternoon following the Saturday night game, he would pay me $5.00. I thought Wow! I can buy four or five meals with that! I thanked him sincerely and took the roll of tickets back to the dorm.
Well, I got to the football stadium on Saturday night of the opening home game, an hour ahead of the scheduled kickoff time. I opened the parking lot and started selling the tickets. Now, you know, when you go somewhere like a movie, you typically buy a ticket at a ticket booth, and then you continue on into the theater and give your ticket to some gate-keeper, who tears the ticket up and gives you the stub. If you think that you might have to leave the movie in the middle and go out past the gate-keeper, then you had better keep the stub, or you won’t be able to get back in. At some places, they won’t let you back in period; for example, most live theaters, but that’s beside the point. In this particular operation, there was only me, and not a one of these hometown fans was likely to leave during the game. Consequently, most of the people driving through just dropped their ticket stubs on the ground within a couple of feet of me.
Now, it might sound easy selling parking lot tickets, but there was more to it than I had previously given much thought to. I kept the roll of tickets in the left hip pocket of my sports coat. I kept the cash in my right pants pocket and my ticket stubs from people I had sold tickets to in the right hip pocket of my sports coat. After I had sold a number of tickets, I started picking up the ticket stubs that people had tossed, and I stuffed them in my left pants pocket. I don’t recall exactly what possessed me to do this, but it turned out to be an unwitting inspiration.
After I had sold all the tickets on the roll, I was still looking at a long line of people who wanted to park, and there was still a lot of vacant space left in the lot. So, I started selling the prior patrons’ ticket stubs from my left pants pocket, and putting the cash into the left breast pocket of my sports coat. (Well, what the hell would you have done?) I kept selling the stubs over and over again like that, until a cop who was covering the lot walked over and told me it was all full now, which it was, and that the kickoff had already occurred (as if I cared!). I had sold something close to 500 tickets, and I was holding the first $100 in my right pants pocket and the remaining $400 or thereabouts in the left breast pocket of my sports coat. I was euphoric. $400 in little more than an hour’s work! (Little did I know at the time that that was the highest hourly rate I would ever make during my entire lifetime!) When I got to my seat in the stadium that my roommate was holding for me, along with our dates, he immediately sensed that something was up, but I gave him the mum’s-the-word sign, and I told him about it later on back at the dorm.
On the following Monday afternoon, I reported to the athletic director as instructed, and I gave him his $100 and the 100 ticket stubs that I had kept in the right pocket of my sports coat. He said good job young fella, and gave me $5.00. He also gave me another roll of 100 tickets for the next game, with the same instructions as before. Well, I continued that gig for three or four home games, until one black Monday afternoon he told me he was sorry, but that one of his football players needed a job and he had to give preference to him. By that time I had made more than $1000 from that job, and my only regret was that it wouldn’t be more.
Back at the dorm, my parking-lot caper became the subject of seemingly endless philosophical debates about the ethics of what I had done. Several of my dorm mates argued that it was highly unethical. I told them they were just envious. I said that if I had not resold the ticket stubs, all those people who had bought them would have had to find other parking places that would have been much farther from the stadium entrance and would have cost more besides.
I also pointed out that most, if not all, of the people I sold tickets to, were avid hometown fans who had probably been parking there for years, so they no doubt knew how big the lot was. If I had closed the gate after selling only 100 tickets, they might have gotten angry; they might have even threatened me physically.
Moreover, I had kept my bargain with the athletic director to a tee. His instructions had been quite specific. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. I was to bring him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs, and he would pay me $5.00. That’s exactly what happened.
The athletic director had been there for a long time, and he must surely have known how many cars the lot would hold. Therefore, I figured that the way I “played the game”, so to speak, was the way it was apparently intended to be played. Nobody was cheated out of any money. Nobody paid for anything he didn’t get. I made some money on the deal, and if I could do it again, I would do it again.
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