Kerrying On

In January 1965, after living their entire lives in soggy Western Washington, my mom and dad packed up their belongings and moved to sunny Arizona. After enjoying the dry climate for several months, Mom wrote a letter to her father inviting him to close up the "mom and pop" store that he operated thirteen-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week and come live with them in Tempe.

It didn't take long for a heated argument to break out. Dozens of us had just arrived in Yorktown, Virginia to undergo officer training for the Coast Guard—each of us with his own story of the ghastly treatment that was rumored to lie ahead. According to scuttlebutt, we were soon to be marched until we dropped, cursed at, threatened, and mentally taxed to the point where many of us would wash out.

Thirty years ago, after landing my first consulting job, I could hardly wait to get started. For years, I had studied how to change the world and now it was my turn to roll up my sleeves and actually do something.

When I was a young boy, I lived with my parents and older brother in a one-bedroom house at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the forest. Couple this isolation with the facts that we didn't own a TV and our car wasn't roadworthy enough to go very far, and it would be correct to conclude that I lived a rather cloistered childhood. By the time I was six, I doubt that I had ventured more than three miles from our home.

As a boy, I loved to watch Father Knows Best, a TV program showcasing your typical sitcom family of the 50s. One of the more memorable episodes involves a short-wave radio that teenager Bud is refurbishing. When he finally gets the contraption working, he finds himself listening to a conversation between two boats located over a thousand miles away. The signal is bouncing off the ionosphere—making him privy to a conversation between the “Betty Anne,” a 34-foot cabin cruiser and other vessels nearby.

Imagine that it's your first day at Fairhaven Junior High School and you learn that every single student in your homeroom (except for you) had been registered at the elite, private, and very expensive grade school across town when they were still embryos. Then, starting at age five, for the next six years of their lives they attended that elite, private, and very expensive school where they were showered with tutors, special programs, and brilliant classroom instruction. . . .

The TV shows I watched as a boy frequently offered up scenes of a father, dressed in suit and tie, coming home from work, carrying an expensive briefcase, and whistling a happy tune. But that would be the end of any work references. Once the briefcase was stowed, no sitcom writer dared bring down the mood with sordid details about the nature of work itself. Consequently, the message of the 50s was as vague as it was odd.. . .

“Captain Newton wants to speak to you,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “The captain?” I thought to myself. I’d only been out of training for a couple of months and already I’d done something wrong! Why else would the boss of the entire base be calling me, a lowly ensign? I was soon to find out.. . .

Most Christmas stories don’t start the day after Christmas. This one does. On December 26, 2006, after opening presents with her husband and baby boy and then hurriedly packing her bags, my daughter Becca climbed onto a jet and started the first leg of a journey to Stavropol, Russia. Becca traveled to this former communist stronghold in response to what she described as an aching in her heart. After she and her husband Bruce had adopted a newborn baby boy a year earlier, Becca was left with the impression that there was more to be done. There was something missing. There was someone who needed her.. . .

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I'd draw this month's material from my childhood trick-or-treating experiences. I'll start with a rather bold allegation. I just may have been the best candy grabber in the history of Halloween. "Pshaw!" you say. Well, here's the evidence.

To pay homage to the tens of millions of people out there who labor long and hard for all of us (often with little pay and virtually no recognition), today I honor my grandfather, The Merchant of Bellingham.

When I was seven years old I learned how to ride a bike. I learned on my brother's old, stripped-down, J.C. Higgins. It was a pathetic little thing possessing no fenders, no handle bar grips, no hand brakes, no . . . just about everything. Then, of course, I wanted to ride the bike every chance I could get, but since it was my older brother's pride and joy, well, you can guess how that worked out. Yearning for a vehicle of my own, I tried to save money to purchase my own bike, but at age seven I only earned 50 cents a week allowance and I usually spent 40 cents of it on a trip to the movies. Every week, I was torn between watching Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and the other heroes of my youth—and saving for a bike. Mom saw my dilemma, and after watching me eyeball my brother's bike for the thousandth time came up with a plan.

I was looking for lead pennies in the change drawer grandpa kept at the front of his grocery store when Chuck hurled his massive bulk through the front door. Chuck’s body wouldn’t let him come in gently. His misshapen feet forced him to lean forward at a tilt that propelled him quickly and precariously across the floor until his cane eventually brought him to a halt. “A pack of Luckies!” Chuck shouted to my grandfather who, having heard Chuck’s rumbling arrival, was now standing behind the counter. The two men exchanged friendly banter as grandpa rang up twenty-three cents on the cash register and handed Chuck two cents in change. I watched as Chuck gingerly leaned on the counter for support, rifled through his right front pocket, pulled out a wooden match, dragged it across the back of the cash register, and then put the flame to one of the cigarettes he had just purchased. I liked Chuck. He was always cheerful and, even though I was only a kid, he treated me like a real person. I felt sorry for him though.

When I attended elementary school in the early fifties, I suffered from fairly severe allergies. Unfortunately, none of the doctors in my hometown believed in such twaddle. I complained of a general sense of malaise until my mother took me to our family physician. He (between puffs on a cigarette) explained that my illness was all in my head and that what I really needed was “a good dose of self-discipline.” Mother politely thanked the doctor and we returned home where I recklessly breathed the air and became sick—causing me to miss school. A lot.

Typically, this time of year, I write a piece about the holiday season. This year, I've penned a story that took place years ago—during the late spring—nowhere close to the holidays. Nevertheless, even though the tale doesn't involve presents, or mistletoe, or anything remotely festive, I think it captures the spirit of the season.

Sometimes you learn important lessons from the most unlikely places. I once learned a terrific lesson about leadership from a milkman. It happened in 1954, when I was eight years old.

Last week while talking with (and trying to impress) my two seventeen-year-old nieces, I mentioned that I had run into Robert Redford at his restaurant just up the hill from our home. The two stared at me with a gaze teenagers typically reserve for a lecture on the history of floor wax. After politely listening to me gush about Bob, one of the twins asked, "Who's Robert Redhead?"

In early 1951, a few months before I entered the first grade at Larrabee Elementary School, the U.S. embarked on one of the most peculiar and troubling lines of research ever conducted. Sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, in a place known as the Nevada Proving Grounds, scientists began detonating nuclear devices. I first became aware of these blasts when Mrs. Plunk, the rather gruff principle (who ruled Larrabee not unlike General Patton ruled the Third Army) started projecting movie clips from the Nevada test site onto the cafetorium wall. If you were to view this same footage today you'd surely ask, "What were those scientists doing to those poor soldiers?" It's not as if the dangers of radiation were a secret. Certainly not in 1951. And yet, the testing continued.

When I was a young boy and our extended family gathered to celebrate holidays, it was common for the adults to congregate in the dining room and play pinochle while we kids romped around the yard or (when it was raining) watched The Hopalong Cassidy Show on our 19” DuMont TV consol. But not always. Sometimes my uncle Vic would break away from the adults and teach me a trick or two. I often wondered why my uncle so readily slipped away from the rest of the adults—just to spend time with a kid. One day, long after he had passed away, I asked my mother why Uncle Vic was as likely to spend time with me as he was to mingle with his peers. “Don’t you know what happened to your uncle?” my mother asked.

Every now and then, someone accomplishes something so remarkable that you just have to talk about it. The accomplishment I have in mind has quietly taken place over the past two and a half decades in some of the most remote, desolate villages on earth. These places are so isolated they're virtually never covered in any news stories and so desolate they have no rivers, streams, or other forms of running water to help keep them alive.