One last comment...
I started school at age 6 in Huntington Park, California. the teachers advanced me twice, with the result that I completed elementary school in four years instead of the normal six. I finished my lower education at SPJHS and at SPHS. I attended Pasadena Junior College for a year and a half and transferred to the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. The university gave me a full scholarship after the first semester, which was a great help, and extra-curricularly I became an announcer at the local radio station, wrote the football column for the local paper, and the music column for the University magazine. I also got a girlfriend (who I later married) and learned to dance.
I got my BS degree at Iowa in 1942 and my Master's degree in 1943. My major was Business Statistics and my minor was Geography. I really think that the University of Iowa days were my happiest days, although you will see that I have nothing to complain about the rest of my life, as well.
I was on my way to get a PhD from Iowa when I received a job offer which I really couldn't refuse--and so I left in mid-year and became a statistician for the Carnegie Foundation in New York City. 1944 was a great year to be in New York City--it was the height of the Big Band era and, with my Iowa girlfriend who had previously moved to New York, we took in all the bands. Toward the end of the year, I was contacted by the State Department, which sent a representative who came to New York to talk to me about a position in the State Department. I was clearly not prepared for the position they had in mind, but he suggested that I take part in a program that the Department was just undertaking to send what we might call non-professional people to some of our offices abroad to do largely administrative jobs while the regular Foreign Service Officers were away on assignments connected to World War II activities. I thought that sounded interesting, so I signed up for that. There was a four-month training period and just before I was to head overseas I decided to take the Foreign Service exam. I left for my first assignment in Recife, Brazil.
After I had been in Recife for two months, the State Department sent a telegram saying that I had passed the Foreign Service exam and shortly thereafter I was called back to Washington to take the oral exam before a phalanx of high-ranking government dignitaries. When it was over I learned that I had become a United States Foreign Service Officer. I served as Vice Consul in Recife and Rio de Janeiro, Secretary of Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, and American Consul in Monterrey, Mexico. By the time I approached the end of my assignment in Monterrey, I had married and had two children. My family loved Monterrey so much that they did not want to move on to some other country, so after much soul-searching we decided that I would resign from the Foreign Service. We prepared to move back to the U.S., even took an apartment in Monterrey so we could return often, and I looked for a job in the U.S., offering my experience abroad and the fact that I had become somewhat fluent in Spanish. To my surprise, I was contacted by a firm I had never heard of--Jerome Barnum Associates of Harrison, New York, a management consultant firm that wanted to expand into Mexico, and wanted to start with an office in Monterrey, the industrial capital of the country. Of course, I took that job and we moved back into our house in Monterrey. I set up offices in Monterrey and Mexico City and was manager of the Mexican operation. It really specialized in giving courses in work simplification and it wasn't long before Mexican executives figured out that, once trained, they could give the work simplification principles to their employees themselves (at much lower cost). At that point I bought the company and turned it into a market research company.
My family in California wanted me to return to Los Angeles, which we really did not want to do. My sister came up with an interesting idea of taking over the representation of a business and if I would go to Los Angeles twice a year to visit the customers, she would take care of the paperwork. So, my sister and I became the representatives of a medium-sized manufacturer of hardwood dowels. The mill was in Maine. I knew nothing at all about dowels. I visited the EIGHT customers, all wholesalers in Los Angeles. Dowels are such a "piddly" product that they were all amazed that anyone would call on them concerning such a nothing product. I asked what we could do to help them sell more and they all told me that it took so long (six weeks) to get an order from Maine that they really didn't make any effort to sell them. And so--I suggested to the mill that they put an inventory in Los Angeles and we would manage it. They agreed, and the next time I visited the eight customers I could say we had an inventory just "down the street", available for immediate delivery. Obviously, we got the rest of the wholesalers in Southern California plus a few furniture manufacturers. The rest of the story covers 30 years. I extended our reach to the San Francisco area and a year after that to the Northwest, where I set up an office and warehouse in Portland. We also started doing things like building small display racks so that retailers could take dowels out of "the back room" and put them out where customers could see them. We started color-coding them so that customers could see what size they were buying and they could be handled better at the checkout counter. We also had some very lucky breaks. One day a company in San Gabriel called and said that they needed a few dowels for a product they were about to introduce. We were glad to oblige and to make the long story short, the item they were going to introduce was the Hula Hoop. Every hula hoop contained a dowel, which is what held the two ends of the plastic tube together. We sold many railroad cars of dowels to Whamo and to their subcontractors all over the country.
Next came the spinning plate, which was not as big a deal as the hula hoop, but which resulted in the sale of a couple of million 1/4" x 36" dowels. Later in the game, we got in on the ground floor of the Macrame craze, selling beads of all sizes and shapes. In 1960, our territory was expanded to include everything south and west of a line from the northeast corner of Idaho to the northeast corner of Mississippi. During that time, we bought a woodworking plant in Kettle Falls, Washington, which made flat parts and which we developed into the second or third largest manufacturer of wooden shelves and shelf brackets in the country. We also bought a handicraft supply company in Tahoe City, California. By that time we had 50 employees and the family decided, reluctantly, that we would have to move back to "the States" because I was gone more than half of the time. We chose Fort Worth, Texas because it is the ideal distribution point for covering the southwestern U.S., and also the closest point to our beloved Monterrey. We moved to Fort Worth in 1962. The company, following the policies we devised in our first office, expanded to the point that I opened offices and warehouses in the Chicago area and in Orlando, Florida. We also sold our building in downtown Los Angeles and moved the California office and warehouse to the City of Industry. In 1985, we took over the national merchandising for the dowel company which by that time was by far the biggest in the country. In 1989, they decided that they wanted to run the whole show and bought me out. I was 67 at the time, and it was time.
My wife and I traveled extensively in the 1990s, which was fun. My wife, Eleanor, died on January 1, 1999, of lung cancer. She had never smoked, nor had any of the rest of us in the family. We were married for 51 years, and had two children, a daughter, Marcia, born in Bogota, Columbia, and a son, Charles, born in Monterrey, Mexico. They both graduated from Texas universities, Southern Methodist and Texas Tech, and live in the Fort Worth-Dallas area, both about 35 miles from my home, the same house we bought here 51 years ago. I live with my cat, Lucky, who is exactly 80 years younger than I. I am in surprisingly good health.
